Dong Xu is a James C. Dowell Professor and chair of Computer Science Department, with appointments in the Christopher S. Bond Life Sciences Center and the MU Informatics Institute at the University of Missouri. After earning his doctorate in 1995, Xu completed two years of postdoctoral work at the U.S. National Cancer Institute and then was a staff scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory until joining the university in 2003. His research includes protein structure prediction, high-throughput biological data analyses and in silico studies of plants, microbes and cancers. His work has been funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Institutes of Health, U.S. Army, United Soybean Board, Missouri Soybean Merchandising Council, Missouri Life Science Trust Fund, Monsanto Co., Cerner Corporation and National Center for Soybean Biotechnology. He has published more than 240 papers and is a recipient of the 2001 R&D 100 Award, 2003 Federal Laboratory Consortium’s Award of Excellence in Technology Transfer and 2010 Outstanding Achievement Award from International Society of Intelligent Biological Medicine. Xu is an editor in chief of International Journal of Functional Informatics and Personalized Medicine and associate editor in chief of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. He is an editorial board member of Current Protein and Peptide Science, Applied and Environmental Microbiology and International Journal of Data Mining and Bioinformatics.