Dr. Liang Chen is a full professor on tea genetic resources, genetics, breeding, and genomics in the Tea Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (TRICAAS) located in Hangzhou, China. He currently serves as the Chief Scientist of the Tea Germplasm Group of the CAAS and the China Agricultural Research System of Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs (for Tea, CARS-019). He is an active, fruitful, respected senior researcher in the tea science community in the world. He is listed “2023 World’s Top 2% Scientists” of “Single year impact”.
He is the Execute Editor for Beverage Plant Research (BPR), Associate Editor for Horticulture Research (JCR TOP1), Editorial Board Member of Agriculture (JCR Q1), BMC Plant Biology (JCR Q1), Turkish Journal of Agriculture and Forestry (JCR Q1), Current Chinese Science, Journal of Tea Science, etc.
Liang completed his Bachelor in Forestry Science at Zhejiang Agriculture & Forestry University, Master of Science and PhD on Tea Science at Zhejiang University, China and postdoctoral research at Cornell University, USA, respectively. He also visited Ehime University of Japan, University of Florence of Italy and Wageningen University & Research of the Netherlands as senior visiting professor in 2001, 2011, 2017, respectively.
He has been the curator of the world’s largest collection of tea genetic resources, National Tea Germplasm Repository @ Hangzhou for 20 years and bred 3 dozen of nationally released and Plant-Variety-Protection covered tea cultivars for the tea industry.
He was the leading expert to prepare the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) Guidelines for the Conduct of Tests for Distinctness, Uniformity and Stability—Tea [Camellia sinensis (L.) O. Kuntze] (TG/238/1). He participated in many international conferences as keynote speaker, invited speaker on tea science, horticulture science, crop science, plant science, molecular biology, and genomics, etc., and chaired some sessions.
Liang co-edited <Global Tea Breeding: Achievements, Challenges and Perspectives>, which was published in Springer-Zhejiang University Press in 2012, <The Tea Plant Genome> to be published in Springer Nature in 2024. He is a co-author of the Crop Trust’s <Global Strategy for the Conservation and Use of Tea Genetic Resources> in 2019. He has published more than 60 papers in reputed international journals, such as Nature Communications (3 papers), Horticulture Research (6 papers), Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry (10 papers), with an H-index of 39.
Dr. Liang Chen has been appointed three times as Honorary Scientist and Advisor of the Rural Development Administration (RDA) of the Republic of Korea in 2005-2008, 2019-2021, 2022-2023, respectively.