Li Tang wins Friedrich Miescher Award

The Friedrich Miescher Award is Switzerland’s highest distinction for outstanding achievements in biochemistry. It was established in 1969 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the discovery of DNA by the Basel scientist Friedrich Miescher, and is now donated by the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research, under the patronage of the MCB section of Life Sciences Switzerland (LS²). The awardees are scientists under the age of 40 who either hold Swiss citizenship or have carried out their research in Switzerland.

This year, one of the two winners of the Friedrich Miescher Award is Li Tang of EPFL's Laboratory of Biomaterials for Immunoengineering. He shares the award with Claudia Keller Valsecch of the Institute of Molecular Biology in Mainz, Germany.

Professor Tang's research focuses on developing multidimensional immunoengineering approaches for enhanced cancer immunotherapies. He received his B.S. in Chemistry from Peking University, China, in 2007 and his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA, in 2012, under the supervision of Prof. Jianjun Cheng. Afterward, he became a CRI Irvington Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of Prof. Darrell Irvine at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2016, he joined the Institute of Bioengineering and the Institute of Materials Science & Engineering at EPFL as a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor, with promotion to Associate Professor in 2022. He is the recipient of multiple international research prizes, the most recent being the CAB Mid-Career Investigator Award (2024), the Biomaterials Award for Young Investigators (2024), and the European Research Council (ERC) starting grant (2018). He was also named in the MIT Technology Review’s "Top 35 Innovators under Age 35" list for China (2020).

The award ceremony and lectures titled "Epigenetics of Sex Differences" and "Type 2 Immunity May Hold Key to Long-Term Cancer Remission" will take place during the LS2 Annual Meeting 2025 on Thursday, February 13^th, from 16:10 on.