Zhao Yuliang

Member of CAS,Director-General, National Center for Nanoscience and Technology of China

CAS Member TWAS Fellow Director of the National Center for Nanoscience and Technology ZHAO also serves as the Vice Chairman of the Chinese Pharmaceutical Association, and the Editor-in-chief of Nano Today, an Elsevier academic journal (IF=20.722), etc. In 1985, ZHAO graduated from Sichuan University with a bachelor’s degree in radiochemistry, engaged in nuclear fuel research. In 1989, he went to the Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute for further studies, and got his master’s degree and doctor’s degree from Tokyo Metropolitan University. He was committed to the research on the mass measurement of nuclear fission fragments, and discovered element 113 (Nh) with his Japanese colleagues. Element 13 is the only element discovered by Asian countries in the current periodic table. Returning to China in 2001, he reoriented his studies from nuclear science to the field of nanoscience, took the lead in raising the issue of nano-biological safety (nanotoxicology), and established the first laboratory. He is one of the first to reveal the in vivo distribution map of inorganic and carbon nanomaterials, biological safety rules such as the structure activity relationship and size activity relationship, and chemical and biological mechanism of tumor nano-drugs, opening up a new field, i.e., the research on nano-robot drug delivery in vivo. More than 500 of his academic papers have been published in international academic journals, and have been cited for more than 60,000 times. He is the rightsholder of 36 invention patents granted in China, the United States, Japan, and the European Union. Some of his research achievements are adopted by ISO and promulgated as international standards. He is the author of the first textbook on nanotoxicology (published in the United States in 2007) in the world. As a pioneer in the fields of nanotoxicology and nanomedicine in China, in 2012, he established the Committee of Nanotoxicology of the Chinese Society of Toxicology, and in 2016, he established the Nanomedicine Professional Committee of the Chinese Pharmaceutical Association. He has won the Ho Leung Ho Lee Science and Technology Award, the Second Prize of the National Natural Science Award, the Outstanding Contribution Award of China Toxicology, and the TWAS Chemistry Award.