Xiaodong Wang was born in 1963 in Wuhan, China and grew up in Xingxiang, Henan Province. He received his B.S. degree from Beijing Normal University in 1984 and came to University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas in 1985 and received his Ph.D. degree in 1991. He stayed at UT-Southwestern for his postdoctoral training in Drs. Mike Brown and Joe Goldstein?s laboratory from 1991 to 1995. After a brief stay at Emory University, he came back to UT-Southwestern in 1996 to take an assistant professor position in the Department of Biochemistry. He joined the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) as an assistant investigator in 1997. He is currently an investigator at HHMI and also holds the title of George L. MacGregor Distinguished Chair Professor in Biomedical Science at UT-Southwestern. From 2003, he serves as a co-director for the new National Institute of Biological Sciences, Beijing. His research centers on the biochemical mechanism of programmed cell death, or apoptosis, in human cells. For his work, he has been honored with the Shaw Prize in life science and medicine from the Shaw Foundation; Molecular Biology Award and Richard Lounsbery Award from the National Academy of Sciences, USA.
