The Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation announced that Xiaowei Zhuang, an alumna of the School of the Gifted Young, has been awarded the 2023 Dreyfus Prize for her contributions in the field of chemical science imaging. 

Professor Xiaowei Zhuang is a biophysicist at Howard Hughes Medical Institute and a physics professor at Harvard University. Born in Jiangsu, China, in January 1972, she was admitted to the School of the Gifted Young (SGY) in 1987 at the age of 15. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1996. She was elected as a member of the American National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the American National Academy of Medicine.

Zhuang’s pioneering contributions in high-resolution optical imaging, single-molecule fluorescence resonance transfer, and other photonics methods and applications have greatly advanced breakthroughs in the field of biomedicine. Her publications have been cited over 12,600 times, with the highest single paper citation exceeding 2,000 times. She is currently a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society, as well as a member of the editorial committees of well-known journals such as Cell, eLife, Annual Review of Biophysics, Chemical Physics Letters, and Optical Nanoscopy.

The Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation was established in 1946 by the chemist, inventor, and businessman Camille Dreyfus. The foundation is dedicated to advancing chemistry, chemical engineering, and related sciences to improve human relations and the environment worldwide.

The Dreyfus Prize is awarded every two years to a scientist who has made outstanding and original research contributions in a selected field of chemical science and has advanced the field. The final winner will receive a personal prize of $250,000, as well as a medal and certificate.