Researcher biography

Professor Chunli Bai, a well-known chemist and leading scientist in nanoscience, is the President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Professor Bai is also the President of University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS) and the President of the Presidium of the Academic Divisions of CAS, and has been newly elected as the President of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS) in September 2012, and started his term from January 1 2013.

Professor Bai graduated from the Department of Chemistry, Peking University in 1978 and received his MSc and PhD degrees from the CAS Institute of Chemistry in 1981 and 1985 respectively. From 1985 to 1987, he worked with the US California Institute of Technology in the field of physical chemistry as a post-doctoral associate and visiting scholar. After back to China in 1987, he continued his research at the CAS Institute of Chemistry. From 1991 to 1992, he worked as a visiting professor at Tohoku University in Japan.

His research areas include the structure and properties of polymer catalysts, X-ray crystallography of organic compounds, molecular mechanics and EXAFS research on electro-conducting polymers. In the mid-1980s, he shifted his research to the fields of scanning tunneling microscopy and molecular nanotechnology.

Professor Bai has a long list of scientific publications and has won more than twenty prestigious awards and prizes for his academic achievements. He was elected Member of CAS and Fellow of TWAS in 1997. He is also Member or Foreign Member of nine world-known academies of science or engineering, including Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and Foreign Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, Member of the German Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech) and Honorary Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences (IAS), Foreign Member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, and honorary director or professor of several foreign universities. He also serves as the Chief Scientist for the National Steering Committee for Nanoscience and Technology and was the Founding Director of China National Center for Nanoscience and Technology. Moreover, he was Member of the Executive Committee of IUPAC (2008-2009), and Member of the International Editorial Advisory Board of JACS, Angewandte Chemie, Advanced Materials and Chemical Physics Letters.