Wang presenting his Human Genome Organization (HUGO) 2015 Chen Award lecture in Kuala Lumpur
English
Wang Jun (born June 4, 1976) is a Chinese scientist, founder and CEO of iCarbonX, and former CEO of the Beijing Genomics Institute (now known as BGI).[1] While studying as a PhD student at Peking University, Wang founded the bioinformatics group at BGI in 1999, which led China's contribution to sequencing 1% of the Human Genome Project.[2] His team was subsequently involved in efforts to genetically sequence the first Asian person, the rice plant, SARS, the giant panda, silkworms, pigs, chickens, goats, and the human gut microbiome, amongst other organisms.[11,12,3,5,10] He was an Ole Romer professor at the University of Copenhagen and co-authored more than 100 papers.[13]
In July 2015, he announced he would be stepping down from his role at BGI to set up iCarbonX and focus on developing artificial intelligence, saying that "both life sciences and genomics have now run into a bottleneck in handling data from tens of thousands of samples... AI and machine learning could do something with big data and for people's health."[2,15] He presented his efforts in setting up iCarbonX and establishing a big data platform for health management at the TED 2017 Conference.[1]
Awards
Awards received include the National Excellent PhD Thesis for Highest Academic Standing from the Ministry of Education, China, and the Outstanding Science and Technology Achievement Award from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Other recognitions include the Lundbeck 2005 Talent Prize, Cell's "40 under 40", Nature's 10 (2012), and Fortune's 2013 "40 under 40". Additionally, they received the Human Genome Organization (HUGO) 2015 Chen Award for Distinguished Academic Achievement in Human Genetic and Genomic Research.