Yuan Weikang was born in Shanghai in 1935, graduated from East China Institute of Chemical Technology in 1957 and completed his postgraduate studies in 1962. He began teaching at Beijing Institute of Chemical Technology in the same year and continued until 1973 when he joined East China University of Science and Technology, where he remains today. He has served as the director of the Department of Chemical Engineering and the director of the Institute of Chemical Reaction Engineering. During this time, he was a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1979 to 1981, a visiting professor at the Technical University of Denmark in 1989, and a visiting professor at the University of Virginia in 1990. He was elected as an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering in 1995. Yuan Weikang has long been engaged in research in chemical engineering, with a focus on chemical reaction engineering. His work in applied basic research includes catalytic reaction engineering and multiphase reaction engineering, reactor modeling and dynamics, and electrochemical reactors. In the research and development of reactors, he has initiated the main ideas of industrial reaction process development methods and successfully hosted several important engineering application projects. He has received numerous national and ministerial awards, including the Ho Leung Ho Lee Prize for Scientific and Technological Progress. He has actively promoted international academic exchanges. In 1992, he proposed the establishment of the Asia-Pacific Reaction Engineering Committee and served as its first chairman. In 1998, he founded the Sino-French Joint Laboratory of Chemical and Environmental Engineering and served as the Chinese director. His current research direction is reactor engineering and non-traditional reaction engineering.