Tang Prize Newsletter

With seeming rock-star status, Emmanuelle Charpentier, one of the recipients of the 2016 Tang Prize in Biopharmaceutical Science, delivered a lecture at the EB 2017 annual meeting, drawing such an eager crowd that many had to wait in the hallway for space.

Charpentier delivered the third annual Tang Prize Lecture at the Experimental Biology meeting in Chicago to a packed house of 1,200-plus enthusiastic students and researchers. Her talk, “The bacterial CRISPR-Cas9 system: a game changer in genome engineering,” told the history of the gene-editing technology CRISPR/Cas9, as well as its powerful future.

Read more about the Tang Prize Lecture @EB

As the adage goes, “There are no old roads to new directions.”

The 2016 laureates might have walked any of the paths that were set out before them, paths clear and well-travelled, their destinations already known. But instead of trusting the paths, they trusted themselves, and entered the forest where it was darkest and thickest.

For the new book on the 2016 laureates, CommonWealth Magazine writer Fang-ju Xu interviewed each of the prize recipients personally on their captivating life-stories, before putting them down in colorful detail. The book gives engaging accounts of the laureates’ roads to success, including the trials and tribulations. From their lives and careers, it is apparent that change and uncertainty are not to be feared, but looked at with a sense of adventure and curiosity.

*The Tang Prize books for 2014 and 2016 are in Chinese only.

Read More about the Tang Prize Book Below

The second year of the Gro Brundtland Week of Women in Sustainable Development was held from March 12 – 17. On the final day of the event, the closing ceremony were held at the Tang Prize Foundation offices, where the five scientists, Drs. Fathiah Zakham from Yemen, Farah Fathima from India, Phyllis Awor from Uganda, Wafa Al-Jamal from Jordan, and Yi-Chun Yen from Taiwan, reported on the results of the week

The week is one of many initiatives set off by the “Godmother of Sustainable Development” Gro Harlem Brundtland. It included a full week of talks and forums, from such luminary figures as Regina Benjamin, former US Surgeon General, Su-May Yu from the Academia Sinica, Kuo-Fong Ma from National Central University, and Fumiko Kasuga, the Future Earth Global Hub Director in Japan.  

Gro Brundtland Week was established in 2015 after the inaugural Tang Prize laureate in Sustainable Development and namesake of the event, Gro Harlem Brundtland, assigned a portion of the funds from her Tang Prize winnings to support women in sustainability and public health related sciences.

Read more here or Watch videos from Gro Week

Jenn-Chuan Chern, CEO of the Tang Prize Foundation, along with foundation representatives, arrived in Hong Kong on May 26 at the invitation of the Chinese Cultural Association of Hong Kong to lecture and promote the Tang Prize. In addition, the visit promoted interested in the recent recipient of the Tang Prize in Sinology.

 

During their time in Hong Kong, the representatives visited Hong Kong’s own Shaw Prize as well as the head of New Asia College, Henry Wong. Pak-Chung Ching, a Shaw Prize Council member, welcomed the guests and lauded the prize for its establishment of a research grant, educational promotion, and arranging speaking events for the laureates worldwide.

Read the full article here

Yu Ying-shih, recipient of the first-ever Tang Prize in Sinology, designated his Tang Prize grant to the founding of a new fellowship, the “Yu Ying-shih Fellowship for the Humanities.” Active from May 2015 through 2019, the fellowship is intended to support promising researchers and scholars in the humanities fields with the financial assistance needed to complete dissertations and other larger academic works.

Each year, six recipients are named as fellowship recipients: three recipients for the academic publication scholarship, worth NT$360,000 each; and three recipients for the dissertation scholarship, worth NT$240,000 each. 

Applications will be accepted from July 1 to August 31, 2017. For application details please visit the website of the Institute of History and Philology of the Academia Sinica (Chinese):
http://goo.gl/mmUyDg

This September, the Tang Prize will be in Israel to host a lecture at the Federation of European Biochemical Societies (FEBS) annual congress (Sept 10 – 14), one of Europe's largest meetings in the molecular life sciences. Prior to the lecture, prize representatives will also attend the New Horizons in Biochemistry & Molecular Biology Education meeting (Sept 6 – 8), hosted by the Weizmann Institute of Science.

The talk at FEBS is one part of the Tang Prize’s commitment to expanding the exchange of information in biopharmaceutical science. One other effort in the same direction is the prize’s 9-year agreement with the International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (IUBMB) to support education in the biological sciences, including interactive educational platforms and stipends for conference-going scholars.

The lecture at this year’s FEBS will be delivered by Biopharmaceutical Science laureate Feng Zhang on September 12, and is titled “Exploring Nature’s Diversity to Harness Molecular Tools.”

Visit the Tang Prize website for more information on the lecture

This 2017 the Tang Prize has revisited the Innovation in High Schools Competition, bringing it back into Taiwan's campuses.

Twenty-two teams from 14 senior high schools throughout Taiwan, including Taipei Municipal Jianguo High School, Taipei First Girls' High School, The Affiliated High School of National Chengchi University, Nantou Zhongxing High School, Concordia Middle School, and National Tainan First Senior High School will bring their bright young minds together to brainstorm unique projects which interpret the four fields of the Tang Prize.

Each team will receive approximately US $300 to complete their project, and will compete for the top three honors at the finals.

More information on the 2017 Innovation in High Schools Competition