Educated at Tianjin Normal Univ., Nankai Univ. (MSc) and Northwestern Univ., USA (PhD, 1987). He is a professor/director of academic committee of State Key Lab of Elemento-oganic Chemitry, Nankai Univ.; and professor/director of Center of Basic Molecular Science, Tsinghua Univ.. He was previously: vice president of Nankai Univ.; and vice minister, Ministry of Sci. and Tech., China. He is recognized for his work on structural effects on bond dissociation energies of organic compounds. His contributions include the widely used solution methods to determine homolytic bond dissociation energies of R-H bonds and establishment of the Y-NO (Y = S, O, N, metal) bond energy scales. He is member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, 2001, and a fellow of the Royal Chemical Society (2007).

Chen is professor of physics at Peking Univ.; vice-pres., CHINA-ICSU Council; honorary pres., Beijing Assoc. of Science and Tech.; and vice-pres. of 25th Exec. Council, IUPAP. He is internationally recognized for his work on particle accelerators with pioneering achievements in the R and D of superconducting and heavy ion linear accelerators in China. His honours include: Award for Science and Tech. Progress, HLHL Found.; First Prize for Achievements in State High-tech program; Second Award for National Science and Technology Progress; First Prizes, State Commission of Science and Technology; Cross of Merit on ribbon, Federal Republic of Germany; DSc (h.c.) from 4 institutions; and honorary professor of physics at Xi'an Jiaotong, Jilin and Harbin Industrial Universities. His membership includes CAS, New York Academy of Sciences and IOP, UK.

Chen is an expert in control theory at the Institute of Systems Science, AMSS, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Beijing. His research interests are mainly in stochastic systems, including system identification, adaptive control, and stochastic approximation and its applications to systems, control, and signal processing. In addition to his research, he is also active in writing educative reviews and monographs. He has authored/co-authored more than 200 journal papers and the following four monographs: Recursive Identification and Parameter Estimation, Stochastic Approximation and its Applications, Identification and Stochastic Adaptive Control, and Recursive Estimation and Control for Stochastic Systems. An academician of CAS, IEEE Fellow, IFAC Fellow, he has received the IFAC Outstanding Service Award.

Fan is prof. of physics at the Inst. of Physics, Chinese Acad. of Sciences (CAS). He is a member of CAS (1991). He works in the field of crystallographic methodology and proposed a series of methods for solving small molecules, proteins, incommensurately modulated structures and for image processing in high-res. electron microscopy. He received the Natl. Natural Science Award of China in 1987, the Ye Qi-sun Prize for Physics from the Chinese Physical Society in 1991, and the Tan Kah Kee Science Award in Maths. and Phys. from CAS in 2006. In collaboration with Professor M.M. Woolfson (FRS, UK), he co-authored the book Physical and Non-Physical Methods of Solving Crystal Structures (Cambridge U. Press, 1995). Recently Fan proposed a method using of X-ray free electron laser sources, for simultaneous X-ray phase identification and structure solution for multiphase polycrystalline samples.