In the early stages of Xiangya medical microbiology, we had Academicians Feifan Tang, who is honored as “Father of Chlamydia trachomatis”, and ZhenpianLi, a famous virologist. We also had Prof. Shien Bai, who invented the "white medium" for C. diphtheriae. In 2001, the Department of Medical Microbiology and the Department of Parasitology were combined to be approved as the Key Discipline of Pathogen Biology of Hunan Province. At present, Prof. Jianhong Lu is the dean and Associate Prof. Yurong Tan is the deputy director.

Microbiology is an important basic medical discipline, as well as a “double first-class” key discipline of Central South University. We are authorized to award master's and doctoral degrees, and we have enrolled more than 60 postgraduates. There are research directions in fields such as microbiomics, virology, tumor virology, human environmental microbiology.

In the past five years, we have obtained 6 national research projects, 5 provincial research projects, and published more than 40 SCI papers. Currently, there are 10 employees engaged in teaching and research, including 2 professors and 7 associate professors.