Hua Tao (华涛) currently serves as Professor of Chinese Studies at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center and Professor and Doctoral Advisor at Nanjing University’s Nationalities and Border Areas Research Institute. An expert on the history and contemporary development of China’s northwestern minorities and on the history of Islam in China, he has taught at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center since 1994. He authored a volume on the history of China’s western regions from the eight to 10th centuries and has published articles in various academic outlets such as Journal of Asian History (in English), Les cahiers de studia iranica (English), Eurasian Studies (English), Historical Research (历史研究), Ethno-national Studies (民族研究), Ethnologia (民族学界[Taiwan]), Studies in World Religions (世界宗教研究), The Journal of Hui Muslim Minority Studies 《回族研究》, The Journal of Xinjiang University 《新疆大学学报》, The Journal of Western Region Studies 《西域研究》and The Journal of Central Asia 《中亚学刊》.

From 1992-1993, Professor Hua was a visiting scholar at the Harvard-Yenching Institute at Harvard University. He cooperatively organized four rounds of Dialogue between Chinese and Islamic Civilizations sponsored by Nanjing University and Harvard-Yenching Institutes (2002 Nanjing、2005 Yinchuan、2006 Kunming、2010 Nanjing). He earned his Ph.D. in history with a focus on Chinese national minorities from Nanjing University in 1989.