Bai Chunli, a well-known chemist and leading nano-scientist, has succeeded Lu Yongxiang as the new president and Party secretary of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), China's major research institute for natural sciences.

Bai, 58, graduated from the Department of Chemistry of Peking University in 1978. He received his master's degree in 1981 and Ph.D. degree in 1985, both from the CAS Institute of Chemistry.

After being a post-doctorate and visiting scholar at the California Institute of Technology of the United States for two years, Bai returned to China in 1987 and continued his research at the CAS Institute of Chemistry. Bai was vice president of CAS from 1996 to 2004, and became its executive vice president in 2004.