Zhiyuan Tan is a Professor at the Department of Plant Breeding, South China Agricultural University, China. From 1987 to 1994, he completed his undergraduate and postgraduate studies at Northwest Agriculture and Forestry University. From 1992 to 1997, he completed his postgraduate and doctoral studies at China Agricultural University. Since then, he has had three periods of postdoctoral research experience—at the Institution of Genetics of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) (1997–1999), the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology, specializing in microbiology and genetics (1999–2001), and the Department of Biochemistry, University of Bremen,Germany, specializing in molecular biology (2002–2003). In 2003, he started work at South China Agricultural University under the "Bringing in Talent" scheme. From 2004 to 2006, he was among the trainees of Guangdong Province's Thousand–Hundred–Ten Program. In 2007, he was selected for the Ministry of Education's talent support program and won the honorary title of excellent instructor for the Tenth National Challenge Cup of National College extracurricular academic and scientific and technological works competition. From June 2009 to December 2009, he was invited to Stanford University as a senior visiting scholar. His research interests include biological nitrogen fixation, microbial classification, gene cloning and expression, biological fertilizer, and microbial fermentation products of wild rice and other gramineous crops.