We are delighted to announce that Professor Xin Lu has been elected to the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE), and that Professor Yang Shi has been elected to the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) as international or foreign academicians.
CAS and CAE are China’s two highest national institutions for science, technology and engineering. CAS focuses on basic and strategic scientific research, spanning across the fields of life science, physics, chemistry, mathematics and information technology. The CAE, by contrast, concentrates on the applied sciences and encompasses medicine, energy, transport, materials, and agriculture. Foreign academicians are selected solely on the strength of their scientific achievements, and many internationally recognised researchers, including several Nobel Laureates such as Charles K. Kao (Nobel Prize in Physics for fibre optic communications) and Barry Marshall (Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of Helicobacter pylori), have been elected to their ranks.
Xin Lu, Director of the Oxford Branch of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research and Professor of Cancer Biology, is recognised for her contribution to the understanding of tumour suppression, most notably through the discovery of the ASPP family of proteins as key regulators of the tumour suppressor p53, the most frequently mutated gene in human cancers.
Yang Shi, Professor of Epigenetics at Ludwig Oxford, is recognised for his discovery of the first histone demethylase, LSD1, and subsequently many others, which overturned the long-held dogma that histone methylation was static and irreversible.
This year a total of 51 foreign academicians have been elected to the Academies, including Dan Shechtman, winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of quasicrystals, and Susan Trumbore, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry and Professor of Earth System Science at University of California, Irvine.
Congratulations to Professors Xin Lu and Yang Shi on this exceptional recognition of their groundbreaking contributions to science.