The Seventh Tang Prize Laureates Unveiled

Sustainable Development: Susan Solomon and the healing of the ozone hole

This year’s Sustainable Development Prize laureate, Susan Solomon, the Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), was a key figure in solving the mystery of the Antarctic ozone hole and in shaping global environmental governance.

Forty years ago, Solomon and her expedition team traveled to the frigid Antarctic, where they made the first direct measurements of reactive chlorine compounds in the atmosphere and confirmed that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were the chief culprit behind ozone depletion. Their findings helped catalyze the Montreal Protocol, widely regarded as one of the most successful environmental treaties in history. In 2016, Solomon’s team became the first to identify signs that the Antarctic ozone layer was beginning to heal, offering a hopeful blueprint for today’s global-warming challenge.

Academia Sinica Academician Shaw Chen Liu, who worked with Solomon at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for 15 years, calls her a world-class scientific talent. In 2009, Solomon published the striking finding that the effects of carbon dioxide emissions on global warming are largely irreversible for 1,000 years, sounding an alarm for carbon reduction. She also co-chaired Working Group I for the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, and its assessments have provided a scientific basis for later climate policymaking, including the Paris Agreement. Solomon even has an Antarctic glacier and a saddle named after her, honoring this “guardian of Earth” who has spent her career moving between science and public policy.

Susan Solomon, laureate of the Tang Prize in Sustainable Development. (photo courtesy of the Tang Prize Foundation)

Biopharmaceutical Science: Rosenberg, Sadelain, and June build anticancer “living drugs”

This year’s Biopharmaceutical Science Prize went to three pioneers of cellular immunotherapy: Steven A. Rosenberg, Michel Sadelain, and Carl H. June. The prize recognizes their success in turning the body’s own immune system into a potent anticancer weapon, revolutionizing treatment for blood cancers and solid tumors.

Rosenberg, widely known as the “father of cancer immunotherapy,” built the clinical framework for adoptive cell transfer (ACT) and was among the first to prove that T cells had the potential to shrink metastatic tumors. Meanwhile, Sadelain and June broke through critical barriers to clinical application and helped make possible the world’s first CAR-T pharmaceutical.

Their research opened a new era of “living drugs.” Emily Whitehead, diagnosed with leukemia at age five and out of conventional options after chemotherapy, became the first child with cancer to receive CAR-T therapy. Fourteen years later, she is alive and healthy. Worldwide, more than 30,000 patients with blood cancers have received CAR-T therapy, giving people with relapsed or refractory blood cancers an unprecedented measure of hope.

Steven A. Rosenberg, laureate of the Tang Prize in Biopharmaceutical Science. (photo courtesy of the Tang Prize Foundation)

Michel Sadelain, laureate of the Tang Prize in Biopharmaceutical Science. (photo courtesy of the Tang Prize Foundation)

Carl H. June, laureate of the Tang Prize in Biopharmaceutical Science. (photo courtesy of the Tang Prize Foundation)

Rule of Law: Bruce Ackerman, master of “dualist democracy”

As democracy around the world faces the rise of populism, institutional deadlock, and other challenges, Bruce Ackerman, winner of the Tang Rule of Law Prize, Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale, and a leading theorist of “dualist democracy,” is more than an ivory-tower thinker—he has also devoted himself to institutional reform. He advocates an idea he calls Deliberation Day, arguing that governments should set aside a pre-election holiday to encourage public reflection and debate. This idea has informed deliberative-democracy experiments in places including the United States and Mongolia.

He has also proposed the idea of an “emergency constitution,” designed to ensure that after a state exercises extraordinary powers in a crisis, it can return to constitutional checks and balances. Ackerman reminds us that a constitution is not a cold set of legal clauses, but an ongoing conversation among all citizens.

Bruce Ackerman, laureate of the Tang Prize in Rule of Law. (photo courtesy of the Tang Prize Foundation)

Sinology: Ge Zhaoguang reorients Chinese intellectual history

The Tang Prize in Sinology has for the first time gone to a scholar based at a Chinese university: Ge Zhaoguang, Distinguished Senior Professor at Fudan University. His own life reads like a legend. As a young man during the Cultural Revolution, he was sent down to the Miao area of Guizhou, where years of hardship helped turn his scholarly attention toward grassroots society and marginalized ethnic communities. His landmark An Intellectual History of China broke with traditional elite-centered accounts of thought, arguing that ordinary people’s knowledge, beliefs, and everyday ideas also belong within the framework.

In recent years, Ge has devoted himself to a trilogy of studies on China featuring a methodology of “viewing China from the periphery.” Drawing on written and visual sources from beyond China—including Korea and Vietnam—he reexamines China’s historical evolution through the perspectives of neighboring countries, helping set a new direction for historical scholarship over the past decade and more.

Tang Prize founder Dr. Samuel Yin, who, relates Tang Prize Foundation CEO Chern, donated NT$3 billion in 2012 to establish the awards, died in May 2026. His son, Yin Chung-yao, who holds a DPhil in Asian literature from the University of Oxford, joined the Foundation’s board in 2012 and now serves as its chairman, continuing to guide the prize’s forward development.

As Samuel Yin believed, the Tang Dynasty’s strength lay in its capacity for inclusion and synthesis. Today, as the world faces century-defining tests—climate change, widening gaps between rich and poor, and turbulence in democratic constitutional systems—the biennial Tang Prize selects outstanding leaders regardless of race, nationality, or gender. By recognizing their innovative and substantive contributions to the world, it points toward solutions that may help shape humanity’s future.

Ge Zhaoguang, laureate of the Tang Prize in Sinology. (photo courtesy of the Tang Prize Foundation)