Taikui Zhang is a Professor in the Department of Plant Sciences at Nanjing Forestry University (China). He received his PhD from Nanjing Forestry University, where he trained in plant genomics and bioinformatics, and completed postdoctoral training in phylogenomics at Fudan University (China). He later worked as a postdoctoral scientist at the Pennsylvania State University (USA) in Prof. Hong Ma’s lab, focusing on plant evolutionary genomics, before joining Nanjing Forestry University as a faculty member in the College of Life Sciences. He has a longstanding interest in plant phylogenomics, particularly in hybridization and whole-genome duplication events, which are often invoked to explain phylogenetic conflicts between gene trees and their corresponding species tree. His current research investigates how genome structural and functional evolution shapes the diversity of grasses and other flowering plants, using genome and transcriptome sequencing followed by bioinformatics and artificial intelligence approaches. His lab also aims to develop bioinformatics tools for (pan-)genomics and phylogenomics, guided by evolutionary principles and informed by tree-of-life perspectives.