Hugo Shong, Executive Vice President of IDG and Chairman of IDG Greater China, has established a fund to support joint scientific exchanges and symposia between the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT and its partners in China.
Shong, an investor and entrepreneur, is particularly interested in building China’s strength in the field of neuroscience and brain disorder research. He first became involved with the McGovern Institute at MIT in 2007 when he made a generous commitment to support student exchanges between the McGovern Institute at MIT and top neuroscience institutes in China.
Since its establishment in 2007, the Shong Fund has supported six Chinese exchange students at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT. They include:
Xiangyu Zhang, an undergraduate at Peking University, spent nine months of the 2014-2015 academic year in Guoping Feng’s lab studying how neural circuits influence behavior. While in Feng’s lab, Zhang focused on the pathological mechanisms underlying schizophrenia and autism.
Shijing Feng of Shanghai Jiao Tong University also visited the Feng lab during the 2014 academic year. While at MIT, she worked on a joint project with Guoping Feng and Yingxi Lin studying how defects in specific neural circuits may contribute to autism.
An-Ming Hu, an MD at Capital Medical University in Beijing, is visiting the lab of Robert Desimone for the 2014-2015 academic year to study the effect of transcranial direct current stimulation on attention. Hu’s primary research focus is on the rehabilitation of stroke and traumatic brain injuries.
Yunxin Wang, a PhD student from Beijing University’s State Key Lab of Cognitive Neuroscience, visited John Gabrieli’s lab at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT during the 2013-2014 academic year. While at MIT, Wang used functional MRI technology to explore how musical training influences language and other human cognitive functions.
Qi Liu, a PhD student at Beijing Normal University, spent the 2012-2013 academic year also in Gabrieli’s lab at MIT. Liu used her time in the McGovern Institute’s imaging center to gain expertise in the use of fMRI and EEG. Liu is particularly interested in learning and memory, and using measures to improve teaching and learning practices in the classroom.
Min Xu spent the second half of the 2012-2013 academic year in the lab of Robert Desimone, director of MIT’s McGovern Institute. A PhD student at the University of Hong Kong, Xu is particularly interested in the neural mechanisms underlying the brain’s processing of language, and specifically the differences in brain activity between native Chinese and English speakers.
In addition to supporting scientific exchange between the institutes in China and the US, the Shong Fund has also made possible joint symposia between the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT and its partners in China. The inaugural symposium, which was held over two days at Tsinghua University in February 2009, featured 19 talks including five by MIT faculty. Two years later, in September 2011, Peking University hosted the joint symposium, followed by MIT in November 2013. At the MIT symposium, twelve guest speakers from Beijing Normal, Tsinghua and Peking Universities delivered talks on subjects ranging from learning and memory to the neurobiology of disease. The fourth joint symposium, also supported by the Shong Fund, will take place at Peking University in May of 2015.
About Hugo Shong
Hugo Shong is executive vice president of International Data Group, chairman of IDG Greater China and founding general partner of IDG Capital Partners. Shong's IDG China fund has invested in nearly 300 leading companies in China, including Sohu, Baidu, and Tencent. An award-winning journalist, Shong has also published more than 40 magazines in China and Vietnam. Since 2010, he has organized the annual Beijing Great Wall Music Festival.
Shong first met Patrick J. McGovern in 1991, and two years later they launched IDG’s venture business in China together. In 2010, Shong partnered with IDG and the McGoverns to launch three new McGovern Institutes for Brain Research at Tsinghua University, Peking University and Beijing Normal University.