Zhang Wenjun, an Alumna of Grade 1998, won the 2016 Sloan Research Fellowship, along with 16 other Chinese researchers.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced 2016 Sloan Research Fellowships on February 23 (US time), with 17 Chinese winning the award.

Among the 17, three graduated from Tsinghua University, two from Peking University, two from Wuhan University, two from Nanjing University, one from Fudan University, one from University of Science and Technology of China, and one from Zhejiang University. Zhang Wenjun, Grade 1998 from Kuang Yaming Honors School was among them.

This fellowship has been awarded for excellent youths in physics, chemistry, and mathematics to offer support and recognition to these early scientists and scholars since 1955. Neuroscience, economics, computer science and computational and evolutionary molecular biology were later included in this fellowship.

There are 126 people awarded the fellowship this time. But since the fellowship was set up, there have been from the winners 43 Nobel Prize winners, 16 Fields Medal winners, and many other outstanding scholars.

Zhang Wenjun obtained her bachelor’s degree from the intensive class of science (now as Kuang Yaming Honors School). She obtained her master’s in biochemistry and molecular biology from Nanjing University in 2004 and her doctorate in chemical engineering from University of California, Los Angeles, in 2009. She has been a researcher at Harvard Medical School from 2009 to 2011.

Now she serves as an assistant professor at Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of California Berkeley and a biologist at Berkeley’s Lawrence National Laboratory.

Her research focuses on applications of biomolecular engineering to medicine and bioenergy. She won NIH Director’s New Innovator Award in 2015 and Paul Saltman Memorial Award in Bioinorganic Chemistry in 2016.