Speaker

Dr. Feng Shao is an investigator and deputy director at National Institute of Biological Sciences (NIBS), Beijing. He was a chemistry undergraduate of Peking University and obtained his PhD from University of Michigan. Before returning to China in 2005 to assume an assistant investigator at NIBS, he was a Damon Runyon Postdoc Research Fellow at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Shao has been appointed as an Endowed Chair Professor of Tsinghua University since 2020 and currently also serves as the Associate Director of Changping National Laboratory and the President of Chinese Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.

Dr. Shao’s research lies at the interface between bacterial pathogen and host immunity. He identified most of the known cytosolic receptors for bacteria, including caspase-11/4/5 for LPS and ALPK1 for ADP-heptose in LPS biosynthesis. He identified gasdermin-D whose cleavage by caspase-1/4/5/11 determines pyroptosis, critical for sepsis and other inflammatory diseases. His work establishes the gasdermin family of pore-forming proteins, re-defining pyroptosis as gasdermin-mediated programmed necrosis.

Dr. Shao has published >100 peer-reviewed articles with the total citation of ~ 68,000 and an H index of 81. His work has been recognized by numerous awards including the Future Science Prize, William B. Coley Award for Distinguished Research in Basic and Tumor Immunology, HHMI International Early Career Award and the Protein Society Irving Sigal Young Investigator Award. He is an elected member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, an associate member of EMBO, and a fellow of American Academy of Microbiology and Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences.

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