Caixia Gao is Principal Investigator of the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology (IGDB), Chinese Academy of Sciences. Prior to joining IGDB in 2009, she served as Research Scientist of DLF’s biotechnology group in Denmark, where she worked in plant genetic transformation and molecular biology. Her current research area mainly focuses on developing a highly efficient and robust CRISPR platform in plant cells to enable targeted genome editing and the application of the resultant methods in improving plants traits for high-quality, disease resistance and stress tolerance in crop species.