Shengwei Hou received his PhD in Bioinformatics at Freiburg University in 2018 under the supervision of  Wolfgang Hess in Germany. After that, he collaborated with Jed Fuhrman at the University of Southern California (USC) for his postdoctoral study on marine microbial ecology until July 2021. 

In August 2021, Hou started the Computational Microbial Ecology and Evolution (CMEE) lab in the Department of Ocean Science and Engineering at the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) as an assistant professor. He is interested in biogeography and interactions of marine microbes, host-virus interactions, mechanisms of microbial environmental adaptation and microbial driven biogeochemical cycles, with the objective of understanding microbial responses to global climate change including but not limited to global warming, ocean acidification and hypoxia.

Hou has published more than 20 papers in top-ranking journals including the ISME J, PNAS, Environ Microbial and RNA Biol. Currently, Hou is a guest editor of Frontiers in Microbiology and a review editor of Frontiers in Marine Science. He is also an experienced reviewer for influential journals including Nature Microbiology, the ISME J, Microbiome and Nature Communications.