Weixing Cao received his Ph.D. degree in crop science from Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, USA, in 1989. From 1989 to 1994, he was a post-doctoral research associate and then an assistant scientist with the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI, USA. Since 1994, he has been a professor at the College of Agriculture, Nanjing Agricultural University, Nanjing, China, where he is currently the director of the Institute of Smart Agriculture and the honorary director of the National Engineering and Technology Center for Information Agriculture (NETCIA). He has accomplished outstanding achievements in the specific areas of crop system simulation and design, growth monitoring and diagnosis, and precision crop management. His main research fields include crop ecology, information agronomy, and smart agriculture. He received the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars from the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Achievement Award from the Crop Science Society of China. He has won the Second-Class National Award for Progress in Science and Technology three times, as the leading recipient.
Yan Zhu is a professor and a dean at the College of Agriculture, Nanjing Agricultural University. She earned her bachelor’s degree at the Nanjing Agricultural University in 1998, and completed her Ph.D. studies at the same university in 2003. She was a visiting scholar at the University of Florida, USA (2012–2013), a visiting scientist at the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA) in 2016, and a visiting scientist at the James Hutton Institute in 2017. She is the director of the National Engineering and Technology Center for Information Agriculture, the Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Information Agriculture. She has won the Second-Class National Award for Progress in Science and Technology four times and won the 2017 Chinese Young Women in Science Award.
