5th WLA Forum to be held in Shanghai next month

The fifth World Laureates Forum will kick off next month in Shanghai.

The science gala will be officially held on November 6-7. But before that a variety of meetings and events will be launched from October 29 through November 5.

The forum will feature 60 top scientists from around the world, including 27 Nobel Prize laureates.

Notably, this year's forum is expected to attract the biggest turnout of overseas top science award winners to offline meetings since the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world in 2020.

They include Roger Kornberg, chairman of the World Laureates Association and the 2006 Nobel laureate in chemistry, and two vice chairmen – Randy Schekman, Nobel Prize winner in physiology or medicine in 2013, and Michael Levitt, winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in chemistry.

Also among the participants will be the two first winners of the WLA Prize, which was set up during last year's forum with the aim of becoming a local version of the Nobel Prize. They are: American computer scientist and statistician Michael I Jordan and German biochemist Dirk Görlich.

Besides, more than 30 academicians from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering, around 50 young scientists and guests, and 100-plus "budding scientists" will also attend the forum.