Jiayang Li is currently the President of Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and vice minister of Agriculture, and Professor of Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). He earned his PhD in biology from Brandeis University in 1991, MS in biology from IGDB in 1984, and BS in agronomy from Anhui Agricultural College in 1981. After completing his postdoctoral research at Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant research at Cornell University, He was recruited as a professor of plant molecular genetics by IGDB, CAS since 1995. His work is mainly focusing on the elucidation of molecular mechanisms underlying plant architecture and the demonstration that this fundamental knowledge can contribute to the development of improved rice varieties through marker assisted breeding.

He was elected as a CAS academician in 2001, and members or foreign members of academies including the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (2004), the USA National Academy of Sciences (2011), The German Academy of Sciences (2012), EMBO (2013), and The International Eurasian Academy of Sciences (2014).