2026 AWARD WINNERS

2026 Steven Chu Gold Medal

Dr. Zhijian “James” Chen will receive the 2026 Steven Chu Gold Medal, which honors an individual for Outstanding Accomplishments in Science, Engineering, and Leadership by the Asian American Academy of Science and Engineering (AAASE). Dr. Steven Chu is a Nobel Laureate and Professor of Physics at Stanford University. This Award is named after Dr. Chu.

Zhijian Chen, Ph.D. is the George L. MacGregor Distinguished Chair in Biomedical Science and Professor of Molecular Biology at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, where he is also affiliated with the Center for Genetics of Host Defense. His pioneering research has transformed our understanding of innate immunity, the body's first line of defense against infection and disease.

Dr. Chen is internationally recognized for discovering cyclic GMP-AMP synthase (cGAS), a key DNA-sensing enzyme that detects foreign or misplaced DNA inside cells and initiates immune responses against infections and cancer. This landmark discovery established the cGAS-STING pathway as a central mechanism of immune surveillance and has opened new avenues for the development of therapies for infectious diseases, cancer, and autoimmune disorders.

Throughout his career, Dr. Chen has received many of the world's most prestigious scientific honors. His awards include the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award (2024), the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize (2023), the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (2019), and election to the National Academy of Medicine (2022). He was also named a Clarivate Citation Laureate and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Widely regarded as a leader in immunology and biochemistry, Dr. Chen's discoveries continue to shape modern biomedical research and advance our understanding of human health and disease.

2026 Rising Star Award

Dr. Rex Ying Will receive the Rising Star Award of the Asian American Academy of Science and Engineering (AAASE), which honors an early-career individual (within 10 years of a doctoral degree) who has demonstrated Distinguished Promise in Science and Engineering.

Rex Ying is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at Yale University. His research spans geometric deep learning, multimodal and structured-data foundation models, efficient AI knowledge and memory, trustworthy AI, and AI for science. He develops models that use graphs and geometry to learn expressive, scalable, and interpretable representations, with a growing emphasis on structured memory and reasoning for AI agents and foundation models in non-Euclidean spaces.

Rex also builds multimodal foundation models and their unified efficient AI knowledge and memory systems for applications across science, engineering, medicine, and finance. He has pioneered many widely used geometric deep learning methods, including GraphSAGE, GNNExplainer, HypLoRA, HELM.

His work has been widely adopted in industry, including production at Google, Meta, Tiktok and Snap. His honors include the ACM SIGKDD Doctoral Dissertation Award (2022), the Amazon Research Award (2024), the Frontiers of Science Awards (2025 and 2026), and the NSF CAREER Award (2026). His research is supported by the National Science Foundation, ARPA-H, the Betty Irene Moore Foundation, and industry partners including Amazon, Goldman Sachs, Samsung, Snap Research, Google Research, Rokt, General Atomics and NetApp.