Tongda Xu

Tongda Xu is a professor of plant biology and Associate Director of the Haixia Institute of Science and Technology at Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, China. He received his BS degree in Biology from Peking University, Beijing, China, and pursued his PhD at the University of California, Riverside (2005–2010) in US. After obtaining his PhD, he was recruited as a Young Investigator at Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory in Singapore, where he established his independent research group and discovered transmembrane kinases (TMKs) as auxin-sensing complexes at the plasma membrane. In 2014, he moved to China and has since continued work on auxin signaling and developmental programming in plants. His laboratory currently investigates how coordinated auxin signaling pathways determine cell fate and developmental patterning in plants, and how these pathways can be engineered for crop improvement. His work has been published in leading journals, including Cell, Nature, Science, PNAS, and Nature Communications et ac.