Zhiping Zhong is a professor at the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, focusing on glacier-preserved microbiota and their connections to past and present climate change. Through interdisciplinary collaborations spanning glaciology and microbiology, ZhiPing aims to advance the use of ice core archives as biological records of environmental change and to improve understanding of the role of cryospheric microbes in Earth system processes under ongoing climate warming. ZhiPing received a PhD in Microbiology from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and subsequently completed postdoctoral training and worked as a Research Associate for near a decade at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center in the United States. At Byrd Center, his research examined microbial and viral communities across a range of cryospheric environments, including the glacier ice cores to explore how the archived microbes/viruses and their interactions have responded to paleoclimate change over tens to hundreds of thousands of years, and the Arctic sea ice and ancient hypersaline brines within permafrost to understand how microbes and viruses evolve and persist under subzero and extreme salinity conditions. ZhiPing’s work has demonstrated that viruses can not only reflect and respond to, but also actively impact climate change in the environments.