Dr. Cong Tan is a Research Professor at Beijing Genomics Institute-Shenzhen and director of R&D department at BGI Bioverse, where he leads research in plant genomics and precision breeding. He also serves as a joint graduate supervisor for the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, and Sun Yat-sen University. He earned his Ph.D. in Biological Sciences from Murdoch University (Australia, 2018) , and an M.Sc. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Huazhong Agricultural University (2012) . His postdoctoral training included a Rutherford Fellowship at the University of Dundee and the James Hutton Institute (UK), followed by postdoc at Murdoch University. Dr. Tan’s research focuses on: (1) integrating plant pan-genomics and spatial transcriptomics to dissect molecular mechanisms underlying agronomic traits and cell-type evolution—exemplified by the Arabidopsis single-cell atlas (Cell, 2025) and the International Wheat Spatial Transcriptome Initiative (Nature Genetics, 2026); (2) developing multimodal omics and AI-driven tools for genome-assisted design breeding, including CropGS-Hub and a barley design breeding platform. He has published over 44 papers in journals such as Nature, Cell, and Nature Genetics, Molecular Plant, Nucleic Acids Res. He serves as a reviewer for Cell, Molecular Plant, Nucleic Acids Res, and is a Young Editorial Board member for iMeta, Horticulture Research and GigaScience.