Dr. Zhengli SHI graduated from Wuhan University in 1987 and pursued her graduate studies in Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (1987-1990), and Montpellier University II, France (1996-2000). She has been working on discovery and characterization of novel viruses from bats and other wildlife. She carried out systemic studies on epidemiology, genetic evolution, interspecies infection mechanism and pathogenesis of bat-borne emerging viruses. The most notable accomplishment of Dr. Shi was to identify that SARS-CoV originated from bats. She discovered that Chinese horseshoe bats are natural reservoir of SARSr-CoVs. Her group isolated SARSr-CoVs from bats sharing high homology with human SARS-CoV and demonstrated their interspecies transmission risk. She also discovered a natural gene pool of SARS-CoV in a bat colony from southwestern China. This series of findings finally authenticated the source of SARS. Recently, her team made another remarkable achievement, discovering that the outbreak of fatal Swine Acute Diarrhea Syndrome in southern China which killed more than 24,000 piglets was caused by spillover of bat HKU2-related coronaviruses. Besides, she has identified a large number of novel bat viruses in great genetic diversity, including filoviruses, adenoviruses, reoviruses, circovirus, etc. Owing to her original scientific findings and contributions to emerging virus studies, Dr. Shi won the second prize of Natural Science Award of China in 2018 and was elected as fellowship of American Academy of Microbiology in 2019. She has provided editorial service to Virology, Virol J and has served since 2017 as Editor-in-Chief for Virologica Sinica.