Rate My Professor Song-Hai Shi

Song-Hai Shi is a Professor and TsienTang Chair Professor in the School of Life Sciences at Tsinghua University, where he also serves as Dean of the School of Life Sciences and Director of the IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research. He earned a B.S. in biological sciences and biotechnology from Tsinghua University in 1996 and a Ph.D. in genetics from the joint program at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 2001. He completed postdoctoral training at the University of California, San Francisco, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute from 2001 to 2006. Prior to returning to Tsinghua in 2019, he held faculty positions at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Weill Cornell Medical College, progressing from Assistant Member/Assistant Professor (2006–2011) to Associate Member/Associate Professor (2011–2015) and Member/Professor (2015–2019), and he continues as Adjunct Professor and Member at those institutions.

His research focuses on the development and function of neocortical circuits in the mammalian brain under normal and disease conditions. Key publications include studies on specific synapse development among sister excitatory neurons (Nature, 2009), asymmetric centrosome inheritance in neural progenitors (Nature, 2009), clonal production of inhibitory interneurons (Science, 2011), and metabolic lactate production coordinating vasculature development (Nature Neuroscience, 2022). Awards and honors include the Amersham Biosciences and Science Prize for Young Scientists (2001), Helen Hay Whitney Foundation Fellowship (2002–2005), McKnight Scholar Award (2010), Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists (2010), Howard Hughes Medical Institute Faculty Scholar Award (2016), and election as an Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (2023). He has also received the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science finalist recognition (2012) and serves in leadership roles advancing brain research at Tsinghua University.