SCIENCE DIRECT - Xuemei Chen grew up in the northeastern city of Harbin in China and received her BS degree in Biology from Peking University in Beijing. She came to the USA in 1989 to pursue her PhD at Cornell University. Under the supervision of David Stern at the Boyce Thompson Institute, she used molecular genetic approaches available at the time to study chloroplast gene expression in the unicellular green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. It was during this time that she began to appreciate the extensive, posttranscriptional mechanisms that impact chloroplast gene expression. After obtaining her PhD in 1995, she moved to the California Institute of Technology to study the molecular mechanisms of floral patterning in Arabidopsis thaliana in the lab of Elliot Meyerowitz. It was an exciting time, as key factors and pathways underlying floral cell fates were being discovered in the field. In 1999 she started her own research group at the Waksman Institute at Rutgers University. She continued to study floral patterning, and the genetic screens conducted in her lab found genes that act on RNA, and this then led to the discovery of microRNAs. She then turned her attention to microRNAs and other small RNAs in subsequent years. In 2005 she moved to the University of California, Riverside, where she is currently Distinguished Professor. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2013. Her lab is currently studying small RNAs and other posttranscriptional mechanisms.