Xiangkai Li is a Professor and the Director of Microbiology at the School of Life Sciences, Lanzhou University. He also serves as an editor of Science of the Total Environment and Scientific Reports, and is a board member of the Chinese Society of Microbiology’s Environmental Microbiology Division. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Microbiology from Wuhan University, China and a Ph.D. in Microbiology from the University of Oklahoma, USA. Before joining Lanzhou University, he served as a postdoc, pursuing research in the field of microbiomes and nutrition at Baylor College of Medicine, USA.