On November 21, the 2025 lists of new academicians for the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering were released. Chen Yongsheng, Chair Professor at Nankai University, was elected as an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In addition, Pierre Agostini, an honorary professor at Nankai University, who was nominated by Nankai University, was elected as a foreign academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences

Chen Yongsheng

Chen Yongsheng, a polymer and materials chemist, is a Chair Professor and doctoral supervisor at Nankai University. Born in March 1963 in Henan Province, he received his bachelor’s degree from the Department of Chemistry at Zhengzhou University in 1984, his master’s degree from the College of Chemistry at Nankai University in 1987, and his Ph.D. from the Department of Chemistry at the University of Victoria, in 1997. He subsequently conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Kentucky and the University of California, Los Angeles. In 2004, he joined Nankai University as a full-time professor at the Institute of Polymer Science in the College of Chemistry.

Chen’s research focuses on functional organic polymers and carbon nanomaterials, and their applications in energy conversion and storage. He proposed the design concepts of an “acceptor-donor-acceptor” architecture for highly efficient, solution-processable oligomeric organic photovoltaics, as well as three-dimensional cross-linked graphene/carbon-based polymer materials. He has developed a variety of novel functional polymer materials, revealed multidimensional structure-property relationships from the molecular to macroscopic scales, and constructed a series of high-performance energy conversion and storage devices. His work has produced multiple original research achievements with significant international impact, some of which have been industrialized. Chen has made outstanding contributions to the advancement of polymer science and national energy technology.

Foreign Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences

Pierre Agostini

Pierre Agostini was born on July 23, 1941, in Tunisia. He received his Ph.D. from Aix-Marseille University in France in 1968 and served as a researcher at the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission’s Paris-Saclay from 1969 to 2003, including as Director of Research from 1999 to 2002. In 2004, he became a professor in the Department of Physics at the Ohio State University and was appointed emeritus professor there in 2018. In 2024, he joined Nankai University as an honorary professor and established the “Pierre Agostini International Research Center for Ultrafast Optics and Applications”.

Professor Agostini specializes in ultrafast photonics. He first discovered above-threshold ionization in laser-atom interactions in 1979 and experimentally achieved 250-attosecond ultrafast laser output and invented the RABBITT (Reconstruction of Attosecond Beating by Interference of Two-photon Transitions) technique for measuring attosecond light pulses in 2001. He was awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics “for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter”.

（Edited and translated by Nankai News Team.)