I first met Xiao-Ming in 2012 at a small meeting in New Orleans on spinal cord injury informatics, which John Bixby and I co-organized with Michihiro Igarashi from Niigata University (Japan).  Xiao-Ming was invited because of his well-known technical expertise and impact in the field.  This led to a long running collaboration between our labs.  He published many high impact papers but two that really caught our attention involved a kinase inhibitor.  When injected at a spinal cord injury site, it promoted regeneration of sensory axons but not motor axons.  When it was injected into motor cortex, it promoted regeneration of the motor axons.  This was especially remarkable as it only required a single injection!  Although John thinks I am a “wild and crazy guy”, even I would never imagine that such an approach would work.  We asked Xiao -Ming to repeat that experiment with another kinase inhibitor we were studying.  He and his colleagues did and when the experiment was complete, he called us and was very excited about the size of the effect of our compound on cortico-spinal tract axon regeneration.  Subsequently, Xiao-Ming shared an RO1 with John and me and we did many experiments together.
 
Over the years, Xiao-Ming invited me to join the editorial board of Neural Regeneration Research and to organize workshops at the International Regeneration Symposium in China.  I was lucky enough to travel with Xiao-Ming to visit beautiful destinations around China.  He was always such an amazing host.  We would discuss science, as well as Chinese history and culture.  He was a teenager during the Cultural Revolution when the Chinese education system nearly collapsed, yet he persevered to become a physician scientist. A colleague said, “His spirit reminds me of bamboo, which is soft when there are strong winds, but never broken”. His humble approach to life made everyone love him.  I am going to miss him a lot.