Winner of 2016 FAOBMB Education Award: Professor Rongwu Yang (China)
Dr Rongwu Yang is currently Professor in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, based in the School of Life Sciences at Nanjing University, in the People’s Republic of China. He received his BS in Biology from Nanjing Normal University in 1986, MS in Biochemistry from Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry of Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1993 and PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Nanjing University in 2006. His research field focused on signal transduction and molecular recognition.
In 1993, Dr Yang began to perform biochemistry teaching and research at Nanjing University. His teaching performance has been widely recognized and highly praised on a nation-wide scale, so he won many teaching awards. He is very popular with his students and was twice selected as the best loved teacher at Nanjing University, in 2015 and 2016. He has participated in many national and provincial projects involving research into biochemistry and molecular biology teaching, as well as the development of teaching material, such as Jiangsu province’s higher education reform research project. He is also involved in a number of scientific research projects on plant signal transduction. He has published many teaching papers and textbooks such as Principles of Biochemistry, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in Chinese.
In 2013, his Course of “Biochemistry” was selected as the National High-Quality Video Open Courses and Resource Sharing Project, launched at www.icourses.cn and is currently the most popular course of its kind. In 2015, his structural biochemistry MOOC was launched at www.coursera.org. In 2016, his structural biochemistry MOOC was also launched at the Chinese University MOOC and got widely welcomed.
As an expert of Ministry of Education of China in middle school biology courses, Dr. Yang participated in validating new biology course standards and textbooks for junior middle school, as well as formulating new biology course standards for senior middle school.