Prof. Shi is a senior scientist at the Guangzhou Laboratory, China. She was the director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. She got her Ph.D training at Montpellier University II, France, from 1996 to 2000. Her research focuses on viral pathogen discovery through traditional and high-throughput sequencing techniques. She has been studying the wildlife-borne viral pathogens, particularly bat-borne viruses since 2004. Her group has discovered diverse novel viruses/virus antibodies in bats, including SARS-like coronaviruses, adenoviruses, adeno-associated viruses, circoviruses, paramyxoviruses and filoviruses in China. One of her great contributions is to uncover genetically diverse SARS-like coronaviruses in bats with her international collaborators and provide unequivocal evidence that bats are natural reservoirs of SARS-CoV. She has coauthored >130 publications on viral pathogen identification, diagnosis and epidemiology.