**About the Editors**

#### **Wei Wei**

Wei Wei received a PhD degree in Botany from the Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He is currently an Associate Professor at this institution. His research interests include biodiversity conservation, and biosafety assessment of biotechnology, as well as plant-environment interaction. He has more than 20 years' experience in risk assessment and governance policy study of genetically engineered (GE) crops. He has recently studied the way forward to utilize past experiences with GE crops for evaluating those organisms developed by newly emerged breeding tools, such as gene drives and gene editing. He completed eight related projects in this area as a principal investigator and participated in more than 10 others. He has authored and co-authored more than 50 scientific papers in English as well as 50 papers in Chinese. He served as an expert member of the ad hoc technical expert group on risk assessment and management of the United Nations' Convention on Biological Diversity from 2008 to 2016, and an expert member of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Task Force on synthetic biology and biodiversity conservation from 2018 to 2021.

#### **Charles Neal Stewart, Jr.**

Neal Stewart, Ph.D, is the Ivan Racheff Chaired Professor in plant molecular genetics, at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, where he has been on faculty since 2002. In 2018, he and Scott Lenaghan co-founded the Center for Agricultural Synthetic Biology, where they are co-directors. Neal Stewart took a PhD from Virginia Tech in biology. He was elected as a AAAS Fellow in 2015 and from 2014-2016 served on the National Academies committee responsible for publishing "Genetically Engineered Crops: Experiences and Prospects" in 2016. He is an author of 340 journal articles, 12 books, and an inventor on 10 issued patents.
