World Laureates Forum gathers prestigious science award recipients in Shanghai

The opening ceremony of the 2026 World Laureates Forum, which brought together over 30 recipients of prestigious international science awards in Shanghai to discuss a new science paradigm for the next decade, was held in the municipality's Lingang area on Saturday.

These top scientists are Nobel laureates, Turing Award winners, Wolf Prize recipients, and Fields Medal winners. Participants at the forum also include 23 academicians at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering, 140 senior and 78 young scientists.

The opening ceremony also hosted the presentation of the 2026 World Laureates Foundation Prize in Computer Science or Mathematics and in Life Science or Medicine. Five laureates, including Ingrid Daubechies, a professor of mathematics at Duke University, who is best known for her work with wavelets in image compression, shared this year's honors.

Shao Feng from the National Institute of Biological Sciences in Beijing became the first scientist holding Chinese citizenship to win the WLF prize.

The WLF prize has been awarded five times, including this year, and a total of 23 scientists have been recognized, making it an internationally influential scientific award among the global community of top scientists.

This year's newly introduced young scientists award honored six scientists, with five holding Chinese citizenship. Organizers said that the award is open to young scholars worldwide, with six winners selected each year.

Kicking off on Friday, the forum features six parallel sessions that focus on emerging frontier fields of future semiconductors, biomedicine, aerospace information, artificial intelligence, future energy, and quantum science.

Among the activities during the event, the young scientists conference will provide a dialogue platform between young scholars and top scientists, the women scientists conference will highlight the "her power" in global technology, and the future scientists conference will enable the younger generation to engage face-to-face with top scientists from around the world and further encourage them to chase their dreams in science.

Scheduled to conclude on Sunday, the forum is expected to release an initiative in international collaboration to help promote frontier science to benefit more people around the globe.