Meng Xie took a PhD in 2014 at McGill University, Montréal, Canada. His doctoral thesis was on studies of the regulation of lipid metabolism in the dauer larvae of Caenorhabditis elegans. With a prestigious EMBO fellowship, he then undertook postdoctoral studies at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, under the guidance of A/Prof. Andrei Chagin. During his postdoc tenure, he worked on several projects, including studies on the mediation of phenotypic plasticity of body size and craniofacial shape by amino acid sensing, and evolution of long bone secondary ossification center and regulation of craniofacial cartilage during development. He has an impressive research output, with articles in Cell Metabolism, PNAS, Nature and eLife. Meng will conduct research at the new units at PKU and CIBR, and assist in training of students and lab management tasks.