On November 4, 2020, Professor Yang Haitao, Principal Investigator at Shanghai Institute for Advanced Immunochemical Institute (SIAIS) of ShanghaiTech University, was honored as one of the ten Falling Walls Winners in category Life Sciences. The Falling Walls Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in Berlin, selected “Breakthroughs” in different categories out of a pool of 900 nominations from 111 countries.
This year’s Falling Walls switched from a physical event in Berlin to an international virtual showcase, with packed schedule of live streams, video presentations, live panels and virtual meetings. During the Falling Walls Winners Session, Professor Yang presented his breakthrough work in “Breaking the Wall to Covid-19 Inhibitors” to the audience online. Professor Yang has been devoted to COVID-19 research since January 2020, combining structure-assisted drug design and virtual drug screening to help identify new drugs to combat COVID-19. Some of Professor Yang’s work on COVID-19 has been published in top Journals Nature, Science etc.
Prof. Yang Haitao is the Principal Investigator of Lab of Infection and Anti-infection at SIAIS and Associate Professor at the School of Life Science and Technology (SLST).
Learn more about Prof. Yang at: http://siais.shanghaitech.edu.cn/siais_eng/LabofInfectionandAntiwinfection/list.htm
The Falling Walls Conference held its first annual meeting on 9 November 2009 – the 20th anniversary of the peaceful fall of the Berlin Wall. Since then, the Falling Walls has grown into a World Science Summit to discuss and celebrate the most recent breakthroughs in science and society, with the theme “Which are the next walls to fall in science and society?”. Leading academic institutions nominated their Breakthroughs of the Year in 10 fields of science, and then in each field, top 10 winners were selected by dedicated juries chaired by Helga Nowotny (Former President of the European Research Council).
The ten Falling Walls Winners in the category life sciences: