Education and Appointments：

Dr. Kang received his B.S. from Huazhong Agricultural University in 1997 and Ph.D from Wuhan Botanical Garden (WBG), Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2006. He had worked at WBG first as an assistant professor and then as an associate professor for five years (from 2002 to 2007). In the end of 2007, he moved to Guangzhou and joined South China Botanical Garden (SCBG) as a professor. After the finish of Ph.D work, he spent a 1-year postdoctoral research at the University of Queensland and the University of Adelaide. In 2010, he worked as a visiting scholar at DukeUniversity.

 

Research Interest：

The karst landforms of Southeast Asia and southern China represent an unrivalled biodiversity-rich feature of the tropical and subtropical terrain, and have long been regarded as “natural laboratories” for ecological and evolutionary studies. Organisms within these landforms appear to exhibit particularly strong spatial and ecological isolation. These tower karsts and karst caves possess many unique, endemic species and were, therefore, listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In particular, the karst landscape of southern China is a center of plant diversity and speciation, and represents an important natural environment in which to study terrestrial plant evolution and speciation. His research work seeks to understand the biodiversity and diversification mechanisms of karst-habitat specialized plants. Recent work focuses on the adaptive evolution and speciation of the African violet family Gesneriaceae. His research involves field work, molecular biology, and common garden experiments. He uses approaches of phylogeny, population genetics, quantitative genetics and genomics to understand the evolutionary processes that were involved in generating the species richness and endemism.