Yu-fei Shen (沈珝琲) is a Professor of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences & Peking Union Medical College in Beijing. She has been the Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Immunological Research since 1992, and the Vice Editor in Chief of the Journal of Medical Biology since 2002. In the past, she had been elected the Vice President of the Chinese Society for Biochemistry & Molecular Biology in 2001–2005; the Chair of the Academic Committee, National Laboratory of Medical Molecular Biology between 1994–2004, and was the chair of the VIth Asian Conference on Transcription. In 1951, she entered the previous Yenching University as a PreMed student at the age of 16 and then graduated from the Peking Union Medical College in 1958. She obtained further graduate training in Biochemistry in the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences from 1962 to 1966. In 1982, she was accepted by the Rockefeller University to be a Guest Investigator in Molecular & Cell Biology on a competitive WHO fellowship and returned to the Institute in 1984. She has been promoted to become a Professor in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in 1987. She had then been offered a Visiting Professorship by the Department of Cell Biology of the Baylor College of Medicine, Houston in 1987–1988, and later the second awardee for the honorary title of the Hsien Wu Professor in Biochemistry between 1992–1994. Her major research interests are in the fields of epigenetic mechanisms in the regulation of mammalian genes and the molecular aspects of the interaction between heat shock and immunity.