Lei Wang is a Professor at UCSF in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, an Investigator at the UCSF Cardiovascular Research Institute, and a member of the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center. He received BS and MS from Peking University mentored by Zhongfan Liu, and PhD from UC Berkeley mentored by Peter G. Schultz. His graduate research resulted in the first expansion of the genetic code to include unnatural amino acids in 2001, for which he was awarded the Young Scientist Award by the Science magazine. After postdoctoral training with Nobel Laureate Roger Y. Tsien, Wang started his group at the Salk Institute in 2005, and moved to UCSF in 2014. Professor Wang has advanced the genetic introduction of unnatural amino acids into proteins in living systems. He pioneered the concept of proximity-enabled bioreactivity, in which an unnatural amino acid selectively reacts with a nearby target natural amino acid, introducing a new covalent bond into a protein. Such modifications can confer exceptional stability, affinity, and optical control on targeted proteins. Technology that Professor Wang developed makes it possible to identify elusive protein interactions in living cells, and provides a route to covalent protein therapeutics. His contributions open up a new field with impacts on biological studies, biotherapeutics, and synthetic biology. Professor Wang is a 2006 Beckman Young Investigator, a 2006 Searle Scholar, a 2008 New Innovator Awardee by National Institutes of Health Director, and the 2021 Emil Thomas Kaiser Awardee by the Protein Society.