Shi Yigong, Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences; President of Westlake University.

Dr. Yigong Shi is a University Professor and Dean of the School of Life Sciences at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. Shi was born in Zhengzhou, China in 1967, and grew up in Henan Province. He received his Bachelor’s Degree from Tsinghua University in 1989 and Ph.D. in Biophysics at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1995. He performed his post-doctoral research at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He joined Princeton University as an Assistant Professor in 1998 and was promoted to Full Professor in 2003. He was named the Warner-Lambert/Parke-Davis Professor of Molecular Biology at Princeton University in 2007. Dr. Shi declined an offer as an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and returned to Tsinghua University in 2008.

Dr. Yigong Shi’s research has provided important insights into programmed cell death and regulated intramembrane proteolysis. His pioneering research on caspase activation, inhibition, and derepression markedly advanced mechanistic understanding of programmed cell death. He was a Searle Scholar and a Rita Allen Scholar. For his research contributions, Dr. Shi received a number of recognitions, including the 2003 Irving Sigal Young Investigator Award from the Protein Society and the 2010 Sackler Prize in Biophysics and 2014 Gregori Aminoff Prize in crystallography. Dr. Shi is an Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Association for Advancement of Sciences, an Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences, and a Foreign Associate of the European Molecular Biology Organization.