Shi Yigong

Shi Yigong (; born May 1967) is a Chinese biophysicist in the field of protein X-ray crystallography. He was the Dean of School of Life Sciences of Tsinghua University, and has been the first President of Westlake University since April 2018.
Career.
Shi Yigong received his bachelor's degree from Tsinghua University. In 1995 when receiving his PhD degree in Biophysics from Johns Hopkins University, he has determined the crystal structure of several critical apoptotic proteins, including apaf-1, DIAP1, and the BIR3 domain of XIAP. He was the Warner-Lambert/Parke-Davis Professor in the department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University. In June 2008, he was selected as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. However, he rejected the award upon resigning his position at Princeton University in order to pursue his career at Tsinghua University, becoming the dean of the School of Life Sciences there. In 2003, he was appointed a Chair Professor of Tsinghua's Department of Biological Sciences and Biotechnology. He was appointed Vice Director of Tsinghua's Institute of Biomedicine and Vice Dean of Tsinghua's Department of Biological Sciences and Biotechnology in 2007. He was appointed Dean of Tsinghua's School of Life Sciences (replacing the Department of Biological Sciences and Biotechnology) in 2009. In 2018, he became the first president of Westlake University, a newly established private university in Hangzhou.
Shi renounced his U.S. citizenship in 2011 in order to reclaim his Chinese citizenship.