World Laureates Forum begins with award-winning science leaders

The fourth World Laureates Forum officially begins in Shanghai's Lingang area from Monday through Wednesday.

The event will feature 131 top scientific award winners, including 68 Nobel Prize laureates and nine Turing Award winners. Among them, 26 will be attending the event for the first time.

Big names present include Reinhard Genzel, who was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for discoveries about black holes, and Tasuku Honjo, who was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for his contribution to immunotherapy in curing cancer.

Also, there are two female Nobel Prize laureates – Donna Strickland and Carol Greider.

Strickland was the third female winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in history for developing chirped pulse amplification. Greider won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for discovering a critical enzyme involved in health and aging.

Additionally, 28 academics from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering will also attend the event.

These attendees include China's first female observatory director, Ye Shuhua, haematologist and molecular biologist Chen Saijuan, and Xu Ningsheng, president of Fudan University.

Other guests include Marco Lambertini, director general of WWF International, Andreas Schleicher, known as the father of PISA, and William G. Cance, chief medical and science officer at the American Cancer Society.

Co-organized by the World Laureates Association and the Chinese Association for Science and Technology, this year's event is themed "Open Science; Build on Open Innovation Ecosystem."

Nearly 100 meetings and activities will be held to discuss chemistry, physics, medicine, and other fields of research.