September 16, 2017 - ShanghaiTech iHuman Institute Founding Director Dr. Raymond C. Stevens was awarded the 2017 Magnolia Silver Award in recognition of his great contribution to scientific research achievement and nurturing and mentoring of Chinese young scientists. Established by the Shanghai Municipal Government in 1989 and named after Shanghai's official flower, the Magnolia Award recognizes foreign experts and partners for their outstanding contributions to Shanghai's economic and social development.
Professor Stevens’ vision is "to image the human body at the molecular, cellular, and human scale and build an atomic resolution model of the integrated human body to understand disease and develop new medicines."
Since its establishment, the iHuman Institute has achieved tremendous scientific research progress, most recently publishing papers in prestigious high impact international journals Cell and Nature. Under its successful leadership team, iHuman is also translating this work to start-up biotechnology companies in Shanghai.
"Our mission," Dr. Stevens said, "is to both train and mentor the next generation of scientific global leaders and to lead the way in integrating human related scientific data at the different spatial and time scales to improve our ability to diagnose and treat human disease."
In 2011, Stevens was a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica (Chinese Academy of Science), where he helped two of his former students (Professors Wu Beili and Zhao Qiang) build their first lab and start their successful independent careers; helped start the biotechnology company RuiYi in 2012 with his former student Professor Xu Fei and later went on to found the iHuman Institute in 2012 at ShanghaiTech University together with Professor Liu Zhi Jie.
About iHuman Institute
The iHuman Institute is an international research effort on ShanghaiTech University’s campus. The institute is a gateway to the exciting world of Shanghai life science research. What makes the iHuman Institute unique is its focus on integrating data across different spatial and temporal scales to build an atomic resolution model of the human body to better understand disease and develop next generation better and safer medicines. The iHuman Institute wants to see a return of the physician’s mantra "treat the patient, not the disease" and carried out at the atomic scale.
iHuman Institute has research groups in the fields of Chemical and Cell Biology, Chemistry, Computational Biology, MRI Imaging, Super-resolution Imaging, Structural Biology, System Biology, and Translational Medicine. The institute has the feeling of a networked team with combined efforts working closely together from different scientific disciplines all excited to decipher the mysteries of the integrated human body. Basic science is at the core of the iHuman Institute, with direct application to diagnostics and drug discovery.
