Road to success

Yuan Junying

Professor of cellular biology at Harvard Medical School and a fellow of the US National Academy of Sciences.

Born in 1958 in Shanghai, Yuan was assigned to work in a textile machinery plant in 1976. She gained the highest score in Shanghai in the 1977 gaokao and went on to study biology at the city's Fudan University. She earned a doctorate in neurology from Harvard University in 1989 and became an assistant professor, obtaining tenure in 2000. Yuan is best known for her work in apoptosis, the process of cell death in multicellular organisms.