Shi Yigong

Chinese biophysicist

Shi Yigong (; born May 1967) is a Chinese biophysicist who serves as founding and the current president of Westlake University since April 2018. He previously served as vice president of Tsinghua University from 2015 to 2018 and dean of Tsinghua University School of Life Sciences from 2009 to 2016.

Shi Yigong received a Bachelor of Science with majors in biology and mathematics from Tsinghua University in 1989 and a Doctor of Philosophy in molecular biophysics from Johns Hopkins University in 1995. He studied at Iowa State University for three months in 1990, before transferring to Johns Hopkins University. During his graduate studies, he determined the crystal structure of several critical apoptotic proteins, including apaf 1, DIAP1, and the BIR3 domain of XIAP.

Shi Yigong was the Warner Lambert/Parke Davis Professor in the department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University. In June 2008, he was selected as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. However, he rejected the award upon resigning his position at Princeton University in order to pursue his career at Tsinghua University, becoming the dean of the School of Life Sciences there. In 2003, he was appointed a Chair Professor of Tsinghua's Department of Biological Sciences and Biotechnology. In late 2007, He was appointed Vice Director of Tsinghua's Institute of Biomedicine and Vice Dean of Tsinghua's Department of Biological Sciences and Biotechnology before returning to China. He was appointed Dean of Tsinghua's School of Life Sciences (replacing the Department of Biological Sciences and Biotechnology) in 2009. In 2018, he became the founding and the first president of Westlake University, a newly established private university in Hangzhou.