Reuben Wang was born in Idaho, U.S.A., in 1986. He spent his childhood mostly in the U.S.A. and went to Taiwan to pursue higher education. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees from the Graduate Institute of Food Science and Technology at the National Taiwan University. He had his postdoctoral training in the Department of Agricultural Chemistry at National Taiwan University. During his initial years of research, he used the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, as a model to investigate the effects of resveratrol extract on DNA repair pathways. Later, he shifted his research interests to studying the bioconversion mechanism of saponins in microbes, especially using a very different approach, which combined the single-gene deletion database of yeast and LC/MSMS. Through these works, he established a firm technical framework for understanding the relationship between saponin bioconversion profiles and gene mutations in microbes. His discoveries have advanced our understanding of the interactions between microbial cell wall structure and their bioconversion activities. Currently, he also steps his foot into the field of environmental microbiology and bacteriophage training, together with his collaborators from Texas A&M University, Academia Sinica, and National Taiwan University, which utilize high throughput and big data analysis approaches ( including transcriptomic and metagenomics) to delineate the microbial-mediated processes of pollutants degradation in the natural and engineered systems and to unveil the potential usage of bacteriophage as a biocontrol agent and biorecognition element.

    His interdisciplinary training in food science, molecular microbiology, chemical analysis, and big data analysis has placed him in a unique position to run and join several collaborative research programs with NTU and the Department of Food Safety / Hygiene and Risk Management at NCKU aimed to improve food safety. These include the development of point-of-care devices based on electrospinning techniques for pathogen detection in ready-to-eat food and studying the impact of different biosecurity practices in laying hen farms on the survival and egg production rate of laying hens. His research findings were published in several high-ranking journals, and have had the rewarding experience of teaching microbiology.