Rate My Professor Yigong Shi

Yigong Shi is the Founding President of Westlake University and a professor in the School of Life Sciences. He received his Bachelor’s Degree in Biology with highest honors from Tsinghua University in 1989 and his Ph.D. in Biophysics from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1995. Following postdoctoral research at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, he joined the faculty of Princeton University as an Assistant Professor in 1998, was promoted to Full Professor in 2003, and was named the Warner-Lambert/Parke-Davis Professor of Molecular Biology in 2007. In 2008, he resigned from Princeton University and returned to Tsinghua University, where he contributed to the development of its biomedical research community for a decade. In April 2018, he was elected as the Founding President of Westlake University.

Shi’s research focuses on structural biology, with emphasis on the mechanisms of programmed cell death (apoptosis) and pre-mRNA splicing. His work has elucidated high-resolution structures of key molecular complexes, including components of the spliceosome and apoptosome. He has received numerous honors, including the 2003 Irving Sigal Young Investigator Award, the 2010 Sackler Prize in Biophysics, the 2014 Gregori Aminoff Prize in crystallography, the 2017 Future Science Prize in Life Sciences, the 2020 Tan Kah Kee Science Award, and the UNESCO-Equatorial Guinea International Prize for Research in the Life Sciences. Shi is an Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, an Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Foreign Associate of the European Molecular Biology Organization, and a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences. He has published extensively in leading journals such as Cell, Nature, and Science, advancing understanding of fundamental biological processes with implications for disease research.