Yaoqin Hong received his PhD in 2014 from the University of Sydney, Australia. He then spent two years working with John Cronan as a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA, to elucidate the biosynthesis and metabolism of bacterial fatty acids and fatty acid-derived enzyme co-factors before temporarily leaving research due to severe illness. Hong’s highlighted works include defining the substrate preference of Wzx flippase and Wzy polymerase and their respective roles in bacterial polysaccharide biogenesis, raising the current working model of how WaaL ligase adjusts polysaccharide repeat-unit supply to demand in  Salmonella enterica and discovering the evolutionary moonlighting events of the ancient lipoic acid biosynthetic pathways. He returned to research in 2018 as a postdoctoral fellow at the Queensland University of Technology, Australia, working with Associate Professor Makrina Totsika and developing his research topics in the Gram-negative cell surface and membrane biogenesis.