Huang Sanwen

Huang earned his BSc and MSc degrees from China Agricultural University, and completed his PhD at Wageningen University (The Netherlands). He currently serves as the president of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS) and is a professor at the Agricultural Genomics Institute at Shenzhen, CAAS. He has made seminal contributions to plant genomics and genome-based crop breeding: his team developed the first generation of highly homozygous inbred lines and hybrid potatoes by genome design, turning the crop from a clonally propagated tetraploid species into a seed-propagated diploid one. This transforms potato breeding from a slow, non-accumulative mode into a fast, iterative one, thus providing a new paradigm for the genetic improvement of clonal crops. Huang was elected to the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2023, and a foreign member of the Royal Society in 2025. Among his honurs are: the State Natural Science Award of China (2018), the Prize for Scientific and Technological Progress from the Ho Leung Ho Lee Foundation (2018), the TWAS Award in agriculture, nutrition, and food systems sciences (2026), and the Tan Kah Kee Science Award in life science (2026).