Dr. Wei Xie is a Professor and Vice Dean of School of Life Sciences, Tsinghua University, and also an HHMI International Research Scholar. He received his B.S. degree in Molecular Biology at Peking University in China in 2003. He pursued his Ph.D study at UCLA, where he joined the laboratory of Michael Grunstein to study the function of histones and histone modifications. He also obtained an M.S. double degree in statistics at UCLA with Ker-Chau Li. After completing his graduate studies in 2008, he continued research in epigenetics and transcription regulation as a postdoctoral fellow in Bing Ren’s lab at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, UCSD in 2009. After his postdoc training, he joined Tsinghua University, School of Life Sciences, in Beijing as a Principal Investigator in 2013. He is also a member of the Tsinghua-Peking Joint Center for Life Sciences. Using interdisciplinary approaches, Dr. Xie is dedicated to understanding how the life clock is reset after fertilization in mammalian embryos. His group established a series of ultra-sensitive technologies to analyze chromatin dynamics using hundreds of cells or fewer. By doing so, his team revealed how chromatin accessibility, histone modifications, and 3D chromatin architecture are reprogrammed during early mammalian development. His work also demonstrated how the embryonic program is activated during zygotic genome activation. Such epigenetic reprogramming is essential for successful parental-to-zygotic transition and the ultimate generation of a totipotent embryo, which occurs through regulatory mechanisms that are often distinct from those in somatic cells and embryonic stem cells. He has authored over 80 publications with over 18,000 citations. He also received numerous awards including the HHMI International Research Scholar. Dr. Xie currently serves as the Review Editor of Science and the editorial board members of Stem Cell Reports and Development.