– of those su ering from the condition, and patients, parents, and other relatives in desperate need of hope. “As a parent of two kids, I do not want to see this desperation in others,” he explained. Born in Hebei province in Mainland China, Prof. Wang was raised in a family of teachers. His liberal-minded parents gave him encouragement to play rather than pressure. Motivation then came from within, with the youngster developing a fascination for mathematics and physics, as well as the medical eld. “As a child, I wondered why people got sick and how they got healed,” he said. “I had the dream of becoming a scientist when I grew up.” He was soon on his way, winning a host of national mathematics contests. He joined Beijing Institute of Technology without having to take the National College Entrance Examination a er obtaining First Class standing in the Chinese Mathematical Olympiad when he was in his nal year at high school. 15 IN FOCUS The rising academic star continued to stand out at university, where he studied information and computational science. Following this, he was accepted for a postgraduate program at the Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, again without having to sit the usual entrance examination because of his top academic results. There, he undertook applied mathematics focusing on operations research and cybernetics, receiving his doctorate in . Postdoctoral research at Columbia University in the US came next, where he went on to be named an Irving Institute Precision Medicine Fellow. Specializing in computational biology and bioinformatics, he integrated data of cancer patients from di erent hospitals to learn about cancer mutations and helped biologists and clinicians solve biomedical problems by analyzing enormous amount of data using statistics and machine learning. He joined HKUST in . “All sciences, at higher levels, become mathematics,” he said. “They become data with the need for data analysis, and thus we have to think quantitatively.” As an indication of the signi cance of his work on others in the eld, Prof. Wang, who is still only in his mid-thirties, has published more than papers with an impact factor higher than . He was among the rst batch of scholars in Hong Kong and Macau to be named a National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) Excellent Young Scientist when the award scheme was opened to applicants from the two Special Administrative Regions in . It is among China’s most prestigious awards for young scientists under . Further recognition earlier this year saw Prof. Wang chosen to receive the Zhong Nanshan Youth Science and Technology Innovation Award – the only awardee from Hong Kong. At HKUST, his sterling work was heralded with the School of Engineering Young Investigator Research Award . He is also keen to share his knowledge directly, supervising over postgraduate students and several postdocs to date. One of his key insights for these young researchers is the importance of asking questions and to nd the ones that they are particularly keen to resolve. “Everyone has a di erent question in life,” he explained. “Find the right eld and right route… and do not think too much about status and all that.” Meanwhile, persistence and the courage to take an individual career path are also indispensable. “Be yourself, and never give up,” Prof. Wang said. Prof. Wang Jiguang, Chemical & Biological Engineering (CBE) and Division of Life Science, is using his specialist knowledge in applied mathematics to advance biomedical research.
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