Chinese Scientists in AI and Deep Sea Studies Named to Nature’s Top 10 List
By Xu Luyi
The scientific journal Nature on Monday released its annual list of ten people who shaped science in 2025, recognizing individuals for breakthroughs in fields ranging from artificial intelligence to deep-sea geology and for taking principled stands on scientific integrity.
The list includes two scientists from China: Liang Wenfeng, the founder of the technology company DeepSeek, and Du Mengran, a geologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Deep-Sea Science and Engineering.
Notably, six of the ten honorees are women, highlighting their leadership roles in public health, neuroscience, immunology, and global governance.
Liang Wenfeng and his company, DeepSeek, shook the technology world in January with the release of a large language model called R1. The model’s high performance and reasoning capabilities, combined with its low cost and a decision to make it fully open-source and free to use, challenged the dominant position of the U.S. in the AI field.
A former quantitative trader who used AI algorithms to trade stocks, Liang founded DeepSeek in Hangzhou in 2023. Breaking from industry norms, the company released the model’s weights for anyone to download and build upon. In September, the team published R1’s complete training methodology in Nature, making it the first major large language model to undergo peer review in a move hailed by peers as “textbook-style transparency.”
Liang, who grew up in a teacher’s family in rural Guangdong province, has long focused on securing computing power, acquiring a large number of Nvidia GPUs years before U.S.-China technology tensions escalated. “It’s like someone buying a piano not to show off, but because there’s a group of people who want to play music,” he once told media.
DeepSeek operates with a non-hierarchical structure where researchers choose their own projects, and it has hired based on potential, with high school students contributing to R1’s core development. While the company is not focused on immediate commercialization, its model is already used in government hotlines and WeChat mini-programs serving tens of millions of users.
While Liang works at the frontier of AI, Du Mengran is expanding human knowledge in the dark, cold depths of the physical world. “I’ve always been curious about the unknown world in the hadal trenches,” Du said. “The best way to truly understand it is to go down yourself, see it with your own eyes, and feel it with your own heart.”
In 2024, aboard the manned submersible Fendouzhe, Du and her team descended more than 9,000 meters into the Kuril-Kamchatka Trench, where they discovered an unexpected deep-sea ecosystem — the deepest known oasis of animal life on Earth. The ecosystem survives not on sunlight but on fluids seeping from the seafloor containing chemicals like methane and hydrogen sulfide, which microbes convert into organic matter through chemosynthesis. Du was the first to observe numerous gastropods, tube worms, and clams in this “cold seep” area, many of which are likely new species.
“She played a key role in these scientific missions,” said Peng Xiaotong, deputy director of the deep-sea institute and a fellow crew member, noting Du’s experience allowed her to quickly identify the chemosynthetic communities and recognize the significance of the find. The discovery prompted the team to redirect its mission to explore other potential cold seeps.
The Nature list also recognized individuals who defended scientific principles against political pressure and academic fraud.
Susan Monarez was fired as acting director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention after less than a month for refusing an order from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to bypass scientific procedures for vaccine pre-approvals. Her dismissal, which she told Congress was for “upholding scientific integrity,” prompted resignations from other senior scientists.
In India, Achal Agrawal resigned his position as a data-science lecturer to combat academic misconduct, founding an organization called India Research Watch to expose fraudulent papers. His work has pushed the Indian government to incorporate institutional retraction rates into its university ranking system.
The list also honored Precious Matsoso, a former director-general of South Africa’s health department who brokered a global pandemic accord among 190 nations after three years of contentious negotiations.
The journal’s selection team noted that while modern science is often a collaborative effort, the field is also filled with stories of individual impact. The team said that it is not an award or a ranking, but a selection of individuals who were part of some of the year’s most important stories in science.
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