NIH-awarded life scientist Shu Xiaokun abruptly shifts research from US to China

2026.03.20 07:20 Shu Xiaokun (right) was the Herfindahl Endowed Chair and a tenured professor at the University of California, San Francisco. According to Fudan University’s official website, he has returned to Shanghai to join the faculty as a distinguished professor. Photo: Handout World-renowned 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 Toby 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 Fudan University’s website, Shu has relocated to Shanghai. As a distinguished professor in 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 said on the website of his personal laboratory at UCSF. But his path to this vision was not a straight line. When he entered university, his 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, where he focused on condensed matter physics. By 2003, he had left for t

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