Prize Recipient

Xiaowei Zhuang
Harvard University

"For seminal contributions to the field of super resolution optical microscopy which is already making major contributions to the biological physics of the cell."

Xiaowei Zhuang, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and Professor of Physics at Harvard University, Investigator of Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Zhuang is a leading expert in single-molecule biophysics and bioimaging. Her lab develops advanced optical imaging techniques, in particular single-molecule and super-resolution imaging methods, to study problems of biomedical interest. The problems under investigation include nucleic acid-protein interactions, virus-cell interactions and neural connectivity. Zhuang received her B.S. in Physics from the University of Science and Technology of China, and her Ph.D. in Physics from University of California at Berkeley under the supervision of Y. R. Shen. In 1997-2001, she performed postdoctoral research in biophysics in Steven Chu's laboratory at Stanford University. In 2001, she joined the faculty of Harvard University as an assistant professor. She was promoted to associate professor in 2005 and full professor in 2006. The awards that Zhuang received includes the MacArthur Fellowship, Sloan Fellowship, Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering, Beckman Young Investigator Award, Searle Scholar award, NSF CAREER award, ONR Young investigator award, Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, Coblentz Award, ACS Pure Chemistry Award, etc.

Peter G. Wolynes, Chair; S. Block; R.E. Goldstein; L. Glass; D. Nolte