Professor Weihong Tan earned his Ph.D. in physical chemistry at the University of Michigan in 1993. Currently, he is the founding director of the Institute of Molecular Medicine at College of medicine at Shanghai Jiao Tong University Renji Hospital. He is also the pioneering director of Hangzhou Institute of Medicine, Chinese Academy of Sciences and the director of the State Key Laboratory of Chemo/Biosensing and Chemometrics. Professor Tan is a distinguished professor of chemistry, chemical biology and molecular medicine.  He served as a University Distinguished Professor and a V.T. and Louis Jackson Professor at the University of Florida’s Chemistry Department and Medical school for more than 24 years. 

Professor Tan’s research is in the general area of molecular medicine, bioanalytical chemistry, and chemical biology. He specializes in aptamer research, DNA nanotechnology, and cancer theranostics. He has published over 900 peer-reviewed scientific papers. According to Thomson Reuters, he is among the small, prestigious group of Highly Cited Researchers for the period between 2014-2022. He served as an Associate Editor for Journal of American Chemical Society and ACS Analytical Chemistry, and is currently an Associate Editor for CCS Chemistry. He has received over thirty awards and honors, including the Beckman Young Investigator Award in 1997, the Pittcon Achievement Award in 2004, the AAAS Fellow in 2005, the ACS Florida Award in 2012, Second prize of National Natural Science Award both in 2014 and 2020, the Award in Spectrochemical Analysis from the American Chemical Society in 2018, the Prize for Scientific and Technological Progress, Ho Leung Ho Lee Foundation in 2018, the Ralph Adams Award for Bioanalytical chemistry in 2019 and The Pittsburgh Analytical Chemistry Award in 2019. Professor Tan has also been recognized as an Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2015, Academician of the World Academy of Sciences in Developing Countries in 2016, and Member of the European Academy of Science in 2019. He has trained more than 120 Ph. D students and more than 150 postdoctors and visiting scholars.