Dr. Qinghua Pan is a distinguished professor of Plant Pathology, Plant Genetics, and Microbiology at the South China Agricultural University (SCAU). He received his BS at the SCAU in 1983, and both MS and PhD at Kyoto University, Japan, in 1994 and 1998, respectively. He was employed as an assistant professor at the Institute of Crop Breeding and Cultivation, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences from 1983 to 1991, and as a postdoctoral reseach fellow at the National Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology of Thailand from 1998 to 1999. He returned to the SCAU, in October 1999, where he has established Rice Blast Research Center, meanwhile, he was a sabbatical professor from 2017 to 2018 at University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, USA. His expertise lies in molecular and population genetics, plant breeding, evolutionary biology, and interactions between host plants and pathogens. His interests focus on genetic studies on the model pathosystem, rice blast disease, especially in mapping and cloning of both resistance and avirulence genes, molecular mechanisms underlying gene-for-gene interactions between resistance and avirulence genes, Dynamics of population genetic structures of both resistance and avirulence genes, and molecular breeding for durable resistance for rice.