Wah Chiu received his BA in Physics and PhD in Biophysics from the University of California, Berkeley. He is the Wallenberg-Bienenstock Professor and a professor in the Department of Bioengineering, Department of Microbiology and Immunology and the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford University. He is a pioneer in methodology development for electron cryo-microscopy (cryo-EM). His work has made multiple transformational contributions in developing single particle cryo-EM as a tool for the structural determination of molecular machines at atomic resolution.

For three decades, Dr. Chiu directs a NIH funded 3DEM Resource Center. He has solved many cryo-EM structures including viruses, chaperonins, membrane proteins, ion channels, antigen-antibody complexes, protein-RNA complexes and RNA in collaboration with many scientists around the world. His lab continues to establish high standard testing and characterization protocols for cryo-EM instrumentation and to develop new image processing and modeling algorithms for cryo-EM structure determination.

Dr. Chiu’s research, collaboration and training efforts have been recognized by his elected membership to the Academia Sinica, Taiwan (2008), and the United States National Academy of Sciences (2012), in addition to several honors including the Distinguished Science Award from the Microscopy Society of America (2014) and the Honorary Doctorate of Philosophy from the University of Helsinki, Finland (2014).