Jitao Chen received his Ph.D. from Seoul National University (SNU), South Korea in 2011 and afterwards he worked as a postdoctoral at SNU and University of California, Davis until the end of 2017. He returned to China in early 2018, and has been working as a full research professor at the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. His research interests focus on field-based, process-oriented, integrated sedimentological, stratigraphic, and geochemical studies, mostly centering around major geological and biotic events of the Paleozoic. He is recently more engaged in the paleoclimate and paleoceanography of the Late Paleozoic Ice Age, trying to understand the interlinked processes and feedbacks of the icehouse Earth system.

He won the first Chinese “Sun-Shu Prize” in 2018, and has been appointed as the member of Editorial Board for Journal of Palaeogeography and several Chinese journals. To date, he has published over 80 peer-reviewed papers including the first- and/or corresponding-authored papers in the high-ranked journals such as PNAS, Geology, Sedimentology, and Geophysical Research Letters, and he also edited several special issues for Earth-Science Reviews, Global and Planetary Change, and Acta Sedimentologica Sinica. He currently co-chairs an International Geoscience Program project (IGCP700), and severs as the voting member for the International Subcommission on Carboniferous.