Lei Liu is an Associate Professor at the College of Resources and Environment, Jilin Agricultural University, China. He received his Ph.D. in Crop Cultivation and has long focused on the physiological and ecological mechanisms underlying crop adaptation to abiotic and combined environmental stresses, particularly in the saline–alkali regions of Northeast China. His research seeks to understand how crops maintain growth and productivity under complex field-relevant stresses, including salinity–alkalinity, drought, low temperature, waterlogging, and environmental contamination. His previous work has focused on stress priming and cross-tolerance, carbon and nitrogen metabolic regulation, reactive oxygen species homeostasis, hormonal signaling, and key stress-responsive metabolites. These studies have contributed to a mechanistic framework in which crop stress tolerance is determined not by a single defensive response, but by the coordinated regulation of metabolic balance, signaling networks, and stress memory. A major current direction of his research is to extend this work from intracellular metabolic regulation to plant–soil–microbe interactions. He is particularly interested in how stress-induced changes in root metabolism and root exudation reshape the rhizosphere microbiome, and how these microbial responses feed back to improve nutrient cycling, rhizosphere conditions, and crop tolerance to saline–alkali stress. His ongoing work integrates plant physiology, root exudate