Dr. Yang is the co-founder and Chairman of Board, BGI, one of the major genomics centers in the world. He and his partners have made a significant contribution to the International HGP, HapMap Project, 1000 Genomes Project, and other human omics research, as well as sequencing and analyzing genomes of many other animals, plants, and microorganisms, with many publications in Science, Nature, Cell and other internationally prestigious journals.

Dr. Yang obtained his Ph.D. from University of Copenhagen (Denmark) and postdoctoral trainings in France and USA. He has received many awards and honors, including Research Leader of the Year by Scientific American in 2002 and Award in Biology by the Third World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) in 2006. He was elected as a foreign member of European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in 2006, an academician of Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2007, a fellow of TWAS in 2008, a foreign academician of Indian National Science Academy in 2009, German National Academy of Science in 2012 and the USA National Academy of Science in 2014. 

Honors and Awards(Partial)

Wang Jian is the President of BGI. He graduated from Central South University in 1979 and obtained his master’s degree from Beijing University of Chinese Medicine. After graduation, he performed postdoctoral research at the University of Texas and the University of Iowa from 1988 to 1990. He worked as a senior research fellow at the University of Washington between 1990 and 1994. From 1997, he participated in Human Genome Project working closely with Huanming Yang and co-founded BGI . Since 1999, he acted as the main initiator of many international research projects including the International 1000 Genomes Project, the Rice Genome Project, the Silkworm Genome Project etc. He has published papers in many international journals and conducted various key national projects.

Executive Vice President, BGI;
Director, Strategic Planning Committee of BGI;

CHO of BGI;

Zhu obtained PhD. From both Tongji University and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology University.
Zhu Yanmei previously served as the Project Director in the headquarters of The Southern Securities Investment Bank; Vice Dean of School of Economics and Management at Tongji University; Executive Dean of Chinese Academy of Science and Technology Management at Tongji University. She was appointed as Vice-director of Yangpu District Development and Reform Commission, Shanghai City. During 2005-2007, she was a visiting scholar of Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. She was also a member of the 6th CPPCC of Shenzhen.

Yonghong Mei is Director of China National GeneBank, Chairman and CEO of BGI Agriculture Group. He graduated from Department of Agronomy, Huazhong Agricultural University. He served as Director of Policies, Regualtions and Reform in Ministry of Science and Technology, Deputy Party Secretary and Mayor of Jining City.   

Shuang Yang is the COO of BGI. In 1999, while studying for his master’s degree, Shuang Yang completed “SERT Genome Sequence and SNP classification project” for mentally ill patient groups in Chinese National Human Genome Center at Shanghai. In 2002, he joined Kunming Institute of zoology CAS for evolutionary genomics research. Since his joining BGI in 2005, he has participated and led many national projects including 973 Project and 948 Plan, as well as several other research and projects on healthcare management and major diseases. He has published papers in Nature, PLOS Genetics and other internationally prestigious journals.

Xun Xu is Executive Vice President of BGI and Director of BGI-Shenzhen. He leads the research and development activities in genomics and other omics field. He has successfully organized and finished genetic diversity map projects for rice, soybean, corn, silkworms, and led the studies on evolutionary analysis. He also successfully coordinated the genome consortiums for the potato, cabbage, CHO, sheep, goat project, etc. 

He built the single cell sequencing platform in BGI and carried out a comprehensive analysis on the cell lineage of cancer cell populations, which reflected possible history about the cancer progression. 

He has already had 9 patents as the inventor and another 44 is in application. He has been leading the research team to publish a lot of high impact papers, among which 12 are listed as first author and 16 are corresponding author. 

He now also leads the team on developing BGI sequencers.

Honors and Awards (Partial):

Yanmei Zhu is Executive Vice President of BGI and Director of Strategic Planning Committee of BGI. Zhu obtained PhD. From both Tongji University and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology University.

Zhu Yanmei previously served as the Project Director in the headquarters of The Southern Securities Investment Bank; Vice Dean of School of Economics and Management at Tongji University; Executive Dean of Chinese Academy of Science and Technology Management at Tongji University. She was appointed as Vice-director of Yangpu District Development and Reform Commission, Shanghai City. During 2005-2007, she was a visiting scholar of Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. She was also a member of the 6th CPPCC of Shenzhen.

Ph.D Genomics from Chinese Academy of Sciences, Rotating CEO of BGI

Feng Mu

Dr. Mu has held various leadership positions in BGI since 1998. He was appointed to be the rotating CEO of BGI in 2017.

In 1999, Dr Mu participated in several projects, such as the human genome project. Dozens of results of his research projects have been published on Nature, PLOS Genetics, Gigasceince and other prestigious journals. Also, he devoted himself into the establishments of BGI sci-tech service platform, the instrument production platform，and the medical service platform. The genomics-based services and solutions he developed, such as diagnose kits for early detection of SARS and Ebola during their outbreak helped slow down spread of pandemic. Dr. Mu obtained 10 patents from State Intellectual Property Office of the P.R.China. He devotes himself and his leadership in BGI to promote industrialization and marketization of transomics solutions, using NGS (next-generation sequencing) technology on human diseases diagnosis (e.g. NIFTY and HearingCare test), and introduces these clinical tests rural areas in China.

Yingjun Sun is Executive Vice President of BGI. He obtained Master of Economics from Fudan University and Master of Business Administration from University of Wales.

He joined BGI in 2001 and served as Chief Financing Officer since 2007. He is responsible for investment and financing management. He also participated in strategy making, asset structure optimization, improvement of assets operational efficiency, and reduction of operational cost.

Ye Yin is CEO of BGI Genomics Co., Ltd. He joined BGI in 2002 and played an indispensable role in fighting against SARS, which has become his first achievement in the early career. He has been in charge of all the scientific collaboration business worldwide, from sales activities to market management, and to technical support in BGI. With BGI’s rapid development into the world-leading organization in genomic field and into diagnostics and agriculture industry, he contributed in the acquisition of Complete Genomics in 2013 and the smooth merge of CG with BGI.

Ye has abundant experiences on massive lab production and quality management. He has successfully guided several international projects, like “1000 Plant and Animal Reference Genomes project”, “One Million Human Genomes re-sequencing project” and so on. He has several publications of genome research projects and genetic insights into medical research.