Clarivate has announced the 2025 Highly Cited Researchers list. Professor Yao Xiaojun from the Centre for Artificial Intelligence Driven Drug Discovery, Faculty of Applied Sciences at Macao Polytechnic University (MPU), has been named among the top 1% of scholars globally in the "Cross-Field" category. He is one of five scholars in Macao to receive this distinction, highlighting the international impact of MPU researchers in interdisciplinary fields.

Clarivate's Highly Cited Researchers list is selected annually to recognize natural and social scientists who have made significant contributions and demonstrated global influence in their respective fields. Selected scholars must have published multiple highly cited papers over the past eleven years, ranking in the top 1% by citations for their field and publication year in the Web of Science Core Collection. In 2025, 6,868 scholars globally received this honour, with a total of 7,131 awards granted.

Professor Yao Xiaojun is an academic leader at Macao Polytechnic University. His main research areas include artificial intelligence in drug design and discovery, multi-scale molecular modelling of the interaction between drug and target, and the molecular targeted anti-cancer drug discovery. He has published over 160 papers as first or corresponding author in top international journals such as Nature Machine Intelligence, Nature Communications, Advanced Science, WIREs Computational Molecular Science, and Pharmacology & Therapeutics. These publications have accumulated over 22,000 citations, demonstrating the extensive impact of his research. Professor Yao also actively promotes research development, having led and completed more than 10 major projects funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Macao Science and Technology Development Fund. His work has made significant contributions to interdisciplinary innovation and the advancement of research at the intersection of artificial intelligence and biomedicine.