Xiaowei Zhuang is the David B. Arnold Professor of Science at Harvard University and an investigator of Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She pioneered the development of single-molecule, super-resolution and genomic-scale imaging methods, including STORM and MERFISH, and has used these methods to discover novel molecular structures in cells and cell organizations in tissues.
Zhuang received her B.Sc. in physics from the University of Science and Technology of China, her Ph.D. in physics under the supervision of Prof. Y. R. Shen from University of California at Berkeley, and her postdoctoral training in biophysics from Prof. Steven Chu at Stanford University. She joined the faculty of Harvard University in 2001 and became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator in 2005. She is a co-founder of Vizgen, Inc.
Zhuang is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Medicine, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and American Philosophical Society, and a foreign associate of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the European Molecular Biology Organization. She received honorary doctorate degrees from the Stockholm University, the Delft University of Technology, and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She has received a number of awards, including the Heinrich Wieland Prize, the FNIH Lurie Prize, the Vilcek Prize in Biomedical Science, the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, the Pearl Meister Greengard Prize, the National Academy of Sciences Award for Scientific Discovery, the Dr. H.P. Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics, the National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology, the Raymond and Beverly Sackler International Prize in Biophysics, the Max Delbruck Prize in Biological Physics, the American Chemical Society Pure Chemistry Award, the MacArthur Fellowship, etc.