Zhigang Shuai received B.Sc. in 1983 from Sun Yat-sen University majoring in physics, M. Sc. from Jinan University in Guangzhou and PhD in theoretical physics in 1989 from Fudan University in Shanghai. Then, he went to Belgium as a postdoc in University of Mons. In 2000, he became a research professor with the support of “Hundred-Talent Program” in the Institute of Chemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He was granted the Outstanding Young Investigator’s Fund from the National Natural Science Foundation of China in 2004. He moved to Tsinghua University in 2008. And since 2022, he joined the School of Science and Engineering, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen as X. Q. Deng Presidential Chair Professor. He served as Associate Dean (Research) since 2023. 

Zhigang Shuai’s research field covers theoretical chemistry, condensed matter physics and computational materials science. He has developed the quantum chemistry density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) algorithm and its time-dependent formalism for the electronic structure and quantum dynamics. He has developed computational methods to modelling and understanding the light-emitting, carrier transport, and energy conversion processes for organic and polymeric materials. He is interested in quantum computing for molecular system. The computational package MOMAP developed by his research group has been successfully commercialized. He has authored/coauthored more than 460 scientific articles (H-factor 96) and five books, plus a dozen of book chapters.

He was the recipient of the Chinese Chemical Society – AkzoNobel Chemical Science Award (2012), the French Chemical Society Prix Franco-Chinois (2018), and the First-Class Award of Beijing Municipal Natural Science Prize (2020). He has been elected to the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science in 2008 and served as vice president from 2018 to 2023. He was elected as Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2009, foreign member of the Academia Europaea in 2011 and foreign member of the Royal Academy of Belgium in 2013, and the scientific board member of the World Association of Theoretical and Computational Chemists (WATOC) in 2017. He was elected to the Executive Board of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) in 2023. He has been elected as the Vice President of the Chinese Chemical Society consecutively in 2018 and in 2022. He has been awarded by Elsevier as the most cited Chinese Researchers since 2020 and the World’s Top 2% Scientists from Stanford University since 2020.