Xiang-Dong Fu

Xiang-Dong Fu is a world-leading molecular biologist who resigned from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine in December 2022 after 30 years, following a China Initiative-era investigation into his ties with Chinese scientists and institutions, and joined Westlake University as a full-time professor in early 2023.

Fu completed his undergraduate studies at Wuhan University, earned his PhD in biochemistry from Case Western Reserve University in 1988, and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University from 1988 to 1992. He joined UCSD's School of Medicine faculty in 1992, earned tenure in 1998, and became a Distinguished Professor of Cellular and Molecular Medicine in 2018. He co-discovered the SR protein family of splicing regulators and the SRPK family of splicing kinases, and his lab elucidated key mechanisms of RNA processing in development, cell fate determination, and disease.

UCSD's investigation into Fu began in 2019, stemming from his long-standing collaborative visits to his undergraduate alma mater, Wuhan University, dating back to 1998. He was suspended and, facing a two-year campus ban starting January 2023, resigned in December 2022. At Westlake, the 66-year-old continues refining a technique to convert brain cells called astrocytes directly into neurons, aiming to develop treatments for Parkinson's disease — building on a 2020 breakthrough published in Nature that reversed Parkinson's symptoms in a mouse model using this approach. "I don't need a huge lab, and I don't need 10 years," Fu said. "But I still have a dream to chase."