Cixi
Empress Dowager, the most famous woman in Chinese history
Tag Archives: Asian Descent > China
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Fan Chung
Fan Chung is a Taiwanese-born American mathematician who works mainly in graph theory.
Sijue Wu
Sijue Wu was born and brought up in China but went to the United States to study for her doctorate. She became Robert W and Lynne H Browne Professor of Mathematics at the University of Michigan. Her research involves the mathematics of water waves.
Lai-Sang Young
Lai-Sang Young is a Hong Kong born American mathematican known for her work on ergodic properties of dynamical systems.
Jia Nanfeng
Often portrayed as a villainous figure in Chinese history, she is seen as the person who provoked the War of the Eight Princes, which led to the Wu Hu rebellions and the Jin Dynasty’s loss of northern and central China.
Tina Tchen
As women around the world speak out against sexual harassment and unfair treatment, Tina Tchen continues to support the movement through her legal activism.
Gabriela Lena Frank
Identity has always been at the center of composer/pianist Gabriela Lena Frank’s music.
Maya Lin
Early success allowed Lin to watch perceptions of her work evolve dramatically over the years. Initial resistance to her work gave way to widespread public admiration for pushing the boundaries of what a memorial is. Her impact on other artists has been widespread in all fields, but perhaps most especially in conceptual sculpture and public art.
Du Yun
Du Yun is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, performance artist, activist, and curator for new music, who works at the intersection of orchestral, opera, chamber music, theatre, cabaret, musical theater, oral tradition, public performances, sound installation, electronics, visual arts, and noise.
Tu Youyou
In 2015, Tu Youyou became the first first Chinese Nobel laureate in physiology or medicine and the first woman from the People’s Republic of China to receive a Nobel Prize in any category. The pharmaceutical chemist and malariologist discovered artemisinin (also known as qīnghāosù 青蒿素) and dihydroartemisinin, a breakthrough in twentieth-century tropical medicine. The resulting malaria treatment saved millions of lives in South China, Southeast Asia, Africa, and South America. While studying traditional Chinese and herbal medicines, she found a reference in ancient medical texts to using sweet wormwood to treat intermittent fevers, a symptom of malaria. Tu and her research team were able to extract artemisinin (qinghaosu) from wormwood in the 1970s. She even volunteered to be the first human subject to test the substance. Tu later became chief scientist at the China Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine, earning her position without a medical degree, a PhD, or research training abroad. In 2011, she became the first Chinese person to receive the Lasker Award for her discovery, which was called “arguably the most important pharmaceutical intervention in the last half-century” by the Lasker Foundation. Tu’s work in the 1960s and 70s coincided with China’s Cultural Revolution, when scientists were denigrated as one of the nine black categories (or “Stinking Old Ninth”) in society according to Maoist theory (or possibly that of the Gang of Four).