Zhili He is a professor at the School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University. He obtained his doctoral degree from the Australian National University in 1998. After that, he worked as a researcher, postdoctoral fellow, and assistant professor at the Research Institute of Innovative Technology for the Earth in Japan (1997-1998), the University of Guelph in Canada (1998-2002), and the Oak Grove National Laboratory in the United States (2003-2005) until 2005. He served as a research assistant professor, associate professor, professor, and deputy director of the Institute of Environmental Genomics at the University of Oklahoma from 2005 to 2017. His research interests focus on (i) microbial ecology related to global change, stress responses, and bioremediation (water and soil ecosystems) using (meta)genomics approaches; (ii) environmental and human/animal/plant microbiomes in terms of diversity, composition, structure, function, dynamics, and their relationships with host (e.g., nutrition, growth, health, disease) and environmental conditions; ((iii) systems microbiology and microbial functional genomics for single organisms and artificial microbial communities to understand gene functions, regulations and networks; (iv) single cell genomics to understand microbial ecology, physiology and evolution of not-yet cultivated microorganisms, and (v) development of biotechnology and bioinformatics tools for Big Data analysis.