Chai Jijie

Professor

Westlake University

Chai Jijie is a chair professor of plant immunology at the School of Life Sciences of Westlake University and a PhD supervisor. He earned a bachelor's degree from Dalian Polytechnic University in 1987, a master's degree from the Sinopec Research Institute of Petroleum Processing in 1994 and a PhD from the Institute of Materia Medica at Peking Union Medical College in 1997. 

From 1997 to 1999, Chai conducted postdoctoral research at the Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and from 1999 to 2004, at Princeton University. He worked as a researcher at the National Institute of Biological Sciences, Beijing, from 2004 to 2009, and became a senior researcher in 2009. 

From 2009 to 2023, he was a professor at the School of Life Sciences, Tsinghua University, and from 2017 to 2023, he was an Alexander von Humboldt Professor at the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research. In 2023, he joined Westlake University as a full-time faculty member. 

Chai has long been engaged in research on the signaling mechanisms of receptor-like kinases (RLKs) and nucleotide-binding leucine-rich repeat (NLR) proteins involved in plant immunity. He has published over 100 SCI papers in internationally renowned academic journals, with more than 22,000 SCI citations. 

Chai’s research systematically summarized the minimal dimerization model of plant RLK activation and the general rules of linear peptide recognition, earning second prize in the National Natural Science Award in 2017. He also discovered plant NLR resistosomes, which earned him the Life Science Prize in the 2023 Future Science Prize. 

He has been invited to give over 100 academic lectures, both domestically and internationally.