Mingnan Qu is an associate professor at the Shanghai Institution of Plant Physiology and Ecology. His research focuses on exploiting functional genes responsible for the photosynthetic pathway. For the RIPE project, he conducted experiments to validate the functions of genes and enzymes from model predictions. Mingnan earned his bachelor's degree in biological sciences from Heilongjiang Agricultural University and his master's degree in crop genetics and breeding from Shenyang Agricultural University. He then went on to earn his doctorate in agronomy from Shenyang Agricultural University in joint doctoral program with the USDA-ARS. His work is published in many peer-reviewed journals, including Plant Physiology, Scientific Reports, and Functional Plant Biology.