Introduction

Dr. Zhang received her B.S. degree in biological technology from Shandong University and subsequently received her Ph.D. degree in botany from Peking University. She accomplished her postdoctoral research at the University of Chicago and was appointed as a principal investigator at the School of Life Sciences and Center for Life Sciences at Peking University. Utilizing approaches of population genetics, evo-devo, genome editing, and bioinformatics, Dr. Zhang has dedicated her research effort to investigating the evolutionary mechanisms of biodiversity from a particular perspective, butterfly mimicry, which is a classic case of macroevolution. In the past decade, she has resolved the evolutionary and genetic mechanisms of multiple butterfly mimicry systems and developed multi-omics and big data-based approaches to facilitate the evolutionary study in non-model organisms. She hopes that her research will explore the mystery of how biodiversity arises and conceptually enrich the modern evolutionary theory.