On the morning of July 21st, 2023, the appointment ceremony was held in the College of Plant Protection. Guo Jun, the Associate Dean of the College, presided over the meeting, and the Dean, Hu Xiaoping, presented the appointment letter to Professor Xu Xiangming.
Hu Xiaoping introduced the background and foundation of the cooperation between the two parties. He said that Professor Xu Xiangming had established close cooperation with the research groups in the field of pest monitoring and biological control in the College of Plant Protection. The two parties have make a significant achievement. He expected to strengthen this collaboration in the future and create greater achievements.
Xu Xiangming expressed that the College of Plant Protection had made great contributions to the control of wheat pest and disease in the world. He would actively promote the construction of cooperation platforms, build bridges for multi-level and all-round cooperation between the two sides, and contribute to the construction of first-class discipline in Plant Protection.
The Dean of the College of Plant Protection, Professor Hu, Issues Appointment Letter to Professor Xu Xiangming
Xu Xiangming is the Vice Director of The National Institute of Agricultural Botany (NIAB) in England, the Director of East Malling Research Institute. He is also an Honorary Professor at Kent University in UK. His main research areas include basic theory and technology of plant disease epidemic prediction, soil microbial population, and biological control. He is also the editor-in-chief or senior editor of 7 journals including Horticulture Research, Phytobiomes, and Frontiers in Horticulture. He is the committee member of the Plant and Microbial Sciences Fund Committee of the National Science Foundation of UK, the director of the Biocontrol Department of the Association of Applied Biologists (AAB) in UK, the Chairman of the Organizing Committee of the 3rd International Symposium on Apple Disease, and the member of the Epidemiology Committee of the International Society for Plant Pathology. He has published 235 research papers in high-quality journals such as Annual Review of Phytopathology, Bioinformatics, and Plant Communications. His H-index is 47, his I10 index is 169, and he has ranked among the top 2% of influential scientists in Plant Biology and Plant Science for three consecutive years. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society for Biology (2013), and was elected as a Fellow of the American Phytopathological Society (2017). He received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Royal Horticultural Society in 2015.
