Dr. Yiming Shao is the Chief Expert of the National Center for AIDS/STD Control and Prevention (NCAIDS) and Director of the Department of the Research on Virology and Immunology, NCAIDS, Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. He has worked in AIDS research and control in China since the mid-1980s, with emphasis on HIV/AIDS prevention and control, HIV vaccines, and molecular epidemiology studies.

Dr. Shao is credited with forming the National AIDS Reference Laboratory, chairing a task force with leading national experts and helping the country set up a five-level HIV testing lab network with 2,500 members.  In addition to routine HIV testing work, the network conducts regular nationwide HIV molecular epidemiology surveys. To date, the studies have identified and tracked the transmission paths of seven HIV-1 clades and numerous recombinants throughout China and has aided the work of many AIDS research groups in China as well as in other countries.
 
Through national and joint EU grants, Dr. Shao works in close collaboration with scientists in Europe on HIV vaccines. He collaborates with U.S. scientists on work with the IDU population in China through grants provided by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). He has also collaborated with Chinese scientists of the Agriculture Academy to study the mechanism of the first successful lentivirus vaccine.

Dr. Shao’s contributions to the advances of virology study led to his election as Chairman of the Virology Committee of the Chinese Microbiology Society in 2001.  In 2002, NIH awarded his team with the first grant from the Comprehensive International Program of Research on AIDS (CIPRA). The $15 million grant supports a five-year, multi-project study in three provinces of China.