Xiaowei Zhuang

Xiaowei Zhuang (; born 21 January 1972) is a Chinese-American biophysicist who is the David B. Arnold Jr. Professor of Science, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, and Professor of Physics at Harvard University, and an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She is best known for her work in the development of Stochastic Optical Reconstruction Microscopy (STORM), a super-resolution fluorescence microscopy method, and the discoveries of novel cellular structures using STORM. She received a 2019 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for developing super-resolution imaging techniques that get past the diffraction limits of traditional light microscopes, allowing scientists to visualize small structures within living cells. She was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019 and was awarded a Vilcek Foundation Prize in Biomedical Science in 2020.

Early life and education Zhuang's father Zhuang Lixian and mother Zhu Renzhi are both professors at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC).

Zhuang graduated from the USTC with a BS in physics in 1991. She obtained her PhD in physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1996 and conducted her thesis research under the supervision of Dr. Yuen-Ron Shen. In 1997–2001, she was a Chodorow Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Steven Chu at Stanford University. She started her faculty position in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and the Department of Physics at Harvard University in 2001 and was promoted to full professor in 2006.

She was named a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator in 2005. that enabled STORM imaging and demonstrated live-cell STORM imaging.

Using STORM, Zhuang and colleagues have studied a variety of biological systems, ranging from single-cell organisms to complex brain tissues. These studies led to the discovery of novel cellular structures, such as the periodic membrane skeletons in the axons of neurons and provided insights into many other cellular structures.

The Zhuang laboratory invented a single-cell transcriptome imaging method, MERFISH (multiplexed error-robust fluorescence in situ hybridization), which allows numerous RNA species to be imaged and quantified in single cells in their native context. Zhuang and colleagues used single-molecule FRET to study biomolecules and molecular complexes and developed single-virus tracking methods to study virus-cell interactions.

Honors and awards

2026: Dickson Prize in Medicine 2026: Ernest Solvay Prize by Syensqo 2024: National Inventors Hall of Fame 2023: Dreyfus Prize in the Chemical Sciences 2022: J. Allyn Taylor International Prize in Medicine 2022: Honorary doctorate, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai 2022: Heinrich Wieland Prize 2021: Great Immigrants Award honored by the Carnegie Corporation of New York 2021: Lurie Prize in Biomedical Sciences 2020: Vilcek Foundation Prize in Biomedical Science 2019: NAS Award for Scientific Discovery 2019: Member American Philosophical Society 2019: Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences 2018: Pittsburgh Analytical Chemistry Award 2017: Honorary doctorate, Delft University of Technology 2017: Lennart Nilsson Award, Karolinska Institute, Sweden 2016: Doctor of Philosophy Honoris Causa, Stockholm University 2016: Vallee Visiting Professorship 2015: Foreign academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences 2015: NAS Award in Molecular Biology 2015: Pearse Prize, Royal Microscopical Society 2013: Member American Academy of Arts and Sciences 2012: Member National Academy of Sciences 2012: Fellow American Physical Society 2012: Fellow American Association for the Advancement of Science 2011: Sackler Prize 2010: Max Delbruck Prize 2008: Coblentz Award 2007: ACS Award in Pure Chemistry 2004: Sloan Fellowship 2003: Packard Fellowship 2003: MacArthur Fellows Program 2003: Beckman Young Investigators Award