Professor Zhengli Shi, Senior Scientist and Principal Investigator of Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory.
Do you believe in coincidences? Because it just so happens that Prof. Zhengli has been ardently researching and experimenting with coronaviruses for years at Wuhan Institute of Virology — even before ground was broken over a decade ago on the new P4 National Biosafety Laboratory. Interestingly, the scientist seems uniquely perfect for her role — like a “Neo” figure in a laboratory version of The Matrix. In fact, Prof. Zhengli has been Senior Scientist and Principal Investigator of Wuhan Insititute of Virology for the last 20 years, initially starting as a Research Assistant in 1990 before upgrading to Research Scientist in 1993, serving in that role until 1995. Aside from a 5-year leave from 1995 to 2000 to get her PhD at University of Montpellier in France, she’s been at the Institute for an amazing 30 years.
Notably, starting in 2014, Prof. Zhengli began to win particularly large sums of grant funding for the express purpose of researching and experimenting with coronaviruses — often receiving numerous, overlapping grants for the same time period. What’s just as interesting is where a lot of this funding originated — the US government. On January 6, 2014, Prof. Zhengli received a US$665,000 grant from the National Institute of Health for a study named The Ecology of Bat Coronaviruses and the Risk of Future Coronavirus Emergence (NIAID R01 AI1 10964) and then four days later on January 10, 2014, an additional US$559,500 grant from the United States Agency of International Development for research studied entitled Emerging Pandemic Threats PREDICT 2_China (Project No. AID-OAA-A-14–00102).
On top of these lucrative American grants she concurrently received similarly significant grants from the National Basic Research program of China, the Chinese Academy of Science, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and from the Strategic Priority Research Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences totaling over US$2,500,000 for researching interspecies transmission of zoonotic viruses, the identification, genetic evolution and pathogenesis of bat viruses, the genetic variation of pathogens in Africa, the evolution mechanism of the adaptation of bat SARS-related coronaviruses to host receptor molecules, the risk of interspecies infection, genetic evolution and transmission mechanism of important bat-borne viruses, and pathogen biology studies on novel swine coronaviruses.