Tong commenced his PHD in October 2020 and is working with flood and salinty tolerance of wild rice species.


Shuai Tong started his PhD with me in October 2020. Tong has a degree in agricultural sciences from the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. He has been awarded a prestigious CSC PhD scholarship to work on the flood and salinity tolerance of wild rice species. 

Progress in Tong's research is regularly reported on my blog.

Tong has decided to progress the excellent work of Johan (former MSc student) who managed to characterize key root and shoot traits of 5 wild species and 2 cultivars in only 12 months.  Tong completed the work and the paper was published in Journal of Experimental Botany in 2023 and even got the cover (see this blog post). The paper is open access and can be accessed from here.


Tong has analyzed various sources of phylogeny in the genus of Oryza and made a nice Venn chart to identify species on which most sources agree on the nomenclature.