One of the only two winners in the world! Xiaowei Zhuang, alumna of the School of the Gifted Young (class of ’87), won the 2020 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise

Recently, the Vilcek Foundation announced the winners of the 2020 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise. School of the Gifted Young alumna Xiaowei Zhuang was awarded with the Biomedical Prize.

 Xiaowei Zhuang obtained her bachelor’s degree in physics from the USTC in 1991, and then received her PhD in physics in 1996 from the University of California, Berkeley. Now she is a member of the United States National Academy of Science, as well as a researcher in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and a professor in the Departments of Physics and Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University. Professor Zhuang has been awarded the MacArthur genius grant, the Beckman Young Investigator Award and many other prizes. She has made outstanding achievements on monomolecular dynamics, gene expression mechanisms and the interaction between viruses and cells. The recent invention of professor Zhuang, Stochastic Optical Reconstruction Microscopy (STORM), has improved the resolving power of fluorescence microscopy to the nanoscale, which greatly stimulated research and development of biological imaging, cytobiology, neurobiology, quantitative transcriptomics within single cells, among many other applications.

  Vilcek Prizes for Creative Promise are awarded to foreign-born artists and scientists working in the United States for extraordinary creativity and original contribution in the early stage of their career. The prizes are given to two winners annually, one for biomedical researchers, the other for professionals in humanities and the arts.