Caixia Gao is a Principal Investigator at the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Prior to joining the IGDB, she served as a research scientist at DLF’s biotechnology group in Denmark. Her research group develops precise and specific genome editing technologies and applies these tools to study plant genetic traits and to develop high-quality, disease resistance and stress tolerance in a variety of crop plants. Her team has published nearly 100 papers on plant genome editing, which have cumulatively been cited over 20,000 times. Her research was selected as one of MIT Technology Review’s 10 Breakthrough Technologies in 2016 and one of the most cited Nature Biotechnology papers over the journal’s 20-year history in the same year. Caixia has been recognized as a “highly cited researcher” by Clarivate in the years of 2009 to 2022 and have been awarded the 2022 Physiologica Plantarum prize, the 2017 China National Innovation Award, and was selected as one of Nature’s “Ten Science Stars of China”. She co-founded Qi Biodesign, a China-based genome editing company focused on incubating the future of sustainable seeds.