Hai-Yang Liu is a professor at State Key Laboratory of Phytochemistry and Natural Medicines, Kunming Institute of Botany (KIB), Chinese Academy of Sciences. He finished his Bachelor's degree in Applied Chemistry (1994) at Sichuan University (Chengdu University of Science and Technology). Then, he received his PhD in Medicinal Chemistry in 2005 from Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences. After graduation, he worked in the State Key Laboratory of Phytochemistry and Natural Medicines of KIB, CAS and as a visiting scholar at University of Mississippi in 2014. He was promoted to Full Professor (2014).

Yunheng Ji is a professor at the State Key Laboratory of Phytochemistry and Natural Medicines, and the CAS Key Laboratory for Plant Diversity and Biogeography of East Asia, Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China. He is an expert in the monocotyledonous families, Asparagaceae and Melanthiaceae, as well as aquatic angiosperms. His research focuses on the evolution, conservation, and sustainable utilization of economically important, endemic, and endangered ("3E") plant taxa, involving in molecular phylogenetics, evolutionary and functional genomics, biogeography, plant taxonomy, and population genetics.

Xing Fang is a professor at State Key Laboratory of Phytochemistry and Natural Medicines, Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences. By comprehensively utilizing techniques such as molecular biology, biochemistry, and phytochemistry, his research focuses on the study of novel structural active secondary metabolites in plants, using phytochemical methods to discover new structurally active natural products, and employing genomics, transcriptomics, enzymology, and other methods to analyze the biological metabolic pathways and enzymatic mechanisms of highly active metabolites.