Yigong Shi received his Bachelor’s Degree in Biology with highest honor from Tsinghua University in 1989 and obtained his Ph.D. in Biophysics at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1995. Following a two-year postdoctoral research period at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, he joined the faculty of Molecular Biology at Princeton University as an Assistant Professor in 1998 and was promoted to Full Professor in 2003. He was named Warner-Lambert/Parke-Davis Professor of Molecular Biology in 2007. A year later, Dr. Shi resigned from Princeton University, declined an offer of an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and returned to Tsinghua University where he led the development of biomedical research community for a decade. In April 2018, Shi was elected as the Founding President of Westlake University, the first research-oriented private university in China.