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Eminent life scientist Shu Xiaokun has received numerous awards and significant funding from the US government over the past two decades.
Earlier this year, he was appointed the prestigious Herfindahl Endowed Chair professor at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), capping a career that included pioneering fluorescent protein tools in Nobel laureate Roger Yonchien Tsien’s laboratory.
The motto of Shu’s lab is a quote from the Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman: “If you’re not having fun, you are not learning. There’s a pleasure in finding things out.”
He is bringing that curiosity back to China.
According to the Fudan University website, Shu has relocated to Shanghai.
As a distinguished professor at Fudan, he will serve as the founding director of the Institute of Chemical and Open Biotechnology Research and Application.
The institute will be launched this month.
It will focus on long-term, interdisciplinary research at the intersection of physics, chemistry and biology – developing next-generation fluorescent probes, chemical genetics tools and novel drugs for targeted tumour therapies.
“The cells’ inner life is like a glowing, beautiful world of Avatar, after we label many proteins in the cell with multicolour fluorescent reporters,” Shu says on the website of his personal lab at UCSF.
But his path to this vision was not a straight line. When he entered university, Shu’s major was neither biology nor chemistry – it was physics.
In 1996, he enrolled in the theoretical physics department at Sichuan University. After completing a master’s degree there, he moved to Fudan University in Shanghai, where he focused on condensed matter physics.
By 2003, he had left for the United States, entering the doctoral programme at the University of Oregon, where his focus shifted from physics to biophysics. During his doctoral studies, Shu focused on the luminescence mechanisms of visible fluorescent proteins – including blue, green, orange and red variants.
After earning his PhD in 2007, he joined Tsien’s laboratory at the University of California, San Diego, to continue his work on fluorescent proteins.
Tsien was a pioneer in using light and colour to observe how cells function. He shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing a palette of probes derived from green fluorescent protein (GFP) – work that illuminated cellular structures and transformed modern biology.
Shu played a significant role in that effort, contributing to the development of GFP mutants in Tsien’s lab.
During his postdoctoral research, he invented an infrared fluorescent protein for labelling in live animals – a breakthrough published in the journal Science.
“If you label a tumour in the body with an infrared fluorescent protein, you get a strong signal to see it from the outside,” Shu told the Chinese magazine Sanlian Lifeweek in an interview in 2019.
He also developed genetically encoded labelling techniques for electron microscopy, expanding the toolkit for biological and medical research.
These achievements led to an associate professorship at UC San Diego in 2010. Two years later, he received the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s New Innovator Award and a research grant of US$2.36 million over five years.
After launching his independent lab, Shu continued integrating physics, chemistry and biology.
His research spans physical biology, chemical biology, structural biology, protein engineering and drug discovery.
In 2019, Shu was awarded the Maximising Investigators’ Research Award, worth US$5.91 million over five years. This award provides support for the programme of research in an investigator’s laboratory that is within the mission of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences.
According to Shu, as quoted on the official Fudan University website, he has so far secured over US$20 million in NIH funding.
His Fudan lab’s webpage says: “We are an interdisciplinary lab, focusing on visualising the inner life of living cells and animals. Positions are available for highly motivated, independently thinking individuals.”
The South China Morning Post has reached out to Shu for comment.