De Zhou was born on 26 February 1985, in Meishan City, Sichuan Province, China. He received his bachelor’s degree in economics from Huazhong Agricultural University in 2008 and his master’s degree in industrial economics from Nanjing Agricultural University in 2011. Between 2011 and 2014, he pursued a Ph.D. in agricultural economics at the University of Goettingen, Germany. After earning his Ph.D., he joined the Courant Research Centre for “Poverty, Equity and Growth” at Georg-August University, Goettingen, as a Postdoctoral Fellow from 2014 to 2015. Since 2015, he has been working at the College of Economics and Management at Nanjing Agricultural University (NAU) as an associate professor in agricultural economics. His research mainly focuses on Food Demand and Safety, Nutritional Health, Food Pricing, and Agricultural Policy. He is the Co-Principal Investigator of several projects granted by National Foundation of Sciences of China (NSFC). He has published more than 30 academic articles in both Chinese and international high-ranked journals.