Dr. Ding was born in 1960, in Kunming, Yunnan Province, China. The third child of five, he grew up in a small village in a rural mountainous area without electricity. His family could not afford to send him to first grade, so he stood outside a classroom window trying to learn Chinese characters, while caring for his younger brother. Surmounting this hardship, he received his Bachelor of Science degree from Beijing Forestry University in 1982. He was then selected as one of the first group of scholars to study abroad upon the implementation of China’s Reform and Open Policy. He earned both M.S. (1986) and Ph.D. (1991) degrees with Dr. Parthasarathy from Cornell University. He then spent three years pursuing postdoctoral studies in the laboratory of Dr. William Lucas at University of California-Davis, where he worked on the role of plasmodesmata in viral infections. In 1994 he moved to Oklahoma State University as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Botany. He later joined the faculty of the Plant Cellular and Molecular Biology program at The Ohio State University in 2000, and was a Full Professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics since 2005.