At the Chinese Annual Meeting of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology held recently, Li Mingyu, a graduate of Zhiyuan College's Biomedical Science division in 2022, had been awarded with the first Prize of Roche University Research Fund for his outstanding contributions to the field of computer-aided drug design. The award is a research fund jointly established by the Roche Group and the Chinese Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology to cultivate outstanding talents in the field of medicine and contribute to the sustainable development of medical education and health care in China.

Li Mingyu is currently a third-year graduate student in Zhang Jian's research group, who is committed to the innovation and development of AI-assisted drug design methods. At this annual meeting, he reported the latest achievements and future planning of "Development and application of artificial Intelligence-driven allosteric drug design methods", and the novelty and completeness of his report was highly recognized and evaluated by the experts attending the meeting. After many rounds of fierce competition, he stood out from more than 100 young talents from more than 30 top universities and research institutions across the country and won the only first prize, not only showing the academic breakthrough of the research group in the field of artificial intelligence drug research and development, but also fully demonstrating the high ambition and vigorous spirit of students of Jiaotong University and the pioneering and innovative academic style.

"Zhiyuan Model" has a profound impact on Li Mingyu's scientific research career. He said that the Zhiyuan's intensive and interdisciplinary curriculum has helped him to develop his ability in solving complex problems in interdisciplinary fields, laying a solid foundation for his scientific research in the highly interdisciplinary field of computer-aided drug design. In the winter vacation of his junior year, Zhiyuan provided him the opportunity to conduct researches at Weizmann Institute of Science, which has had broadened his scientific research vision and strengthened his scientific research direction. In addition, he is especially grateful to Zhiyuan College for encouraging undergraduate students to conduct independent scientific research, so that he was able to find the research direction that he is really interested in during the undergraduate period. It was in her sophomore year that Li Mingyu met his mentor Professor Zhang Jian, a teacher from Medical School of SJTU via hosting the "Zhiyuan Future Scholars" project of the school, and was promoted to Zhang Jian's research group with excellent results two years later. During his doctoral period, Mingyu continued to deepen the research topics of the Future Scholars program and continued to focus on the research of original drug design.