Yigong Shi received his bachelor’s degree with highest honor from Tsinghua University in 1989 and his Ph.D. in biophysics from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1995. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, he joined Princeton University as an Assistant Professor in 1998 and was promoted to Professor in 2003. He was named the Warner-Lambert/Parke-Davis Professor of Molecular Biology in 2007. He resigned from Princeton University, declined an Investigator’s offer from Howard Hughes Medical Institute and returned to Tsinghua University in 2008. He is a foreign associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, an honorary foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a foreign associate of the European Molecular Biology Organization.

Shi’s research focuses on three distinct areas: programmed cell death, regulated intramembrane proteolysis, and pre-mRNA splicing. He has received a number of recognitions, including a 1999–2002 Searle Scholarship, the 2003 Irving Sigal Young Investigator Award from the Protein Society, the 2010 Sackler Prize in Biophysics, and the 2014 Gregori Amino Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.