(Yicai) Nov. 23 -- The Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering, which represent the country’s highest academic level, have elected a total of 133 new members.

The CAS elected 59 new academicians from a poll of 583 candidates to bring its total member count to 873, it announced yesterday. The CAE elected 74 new members among 655 candidates, bringing its total academician count to 978, the academy said in a separate statement yesterday.

This year’s academician elections of the two academies used a new method allowing external experts to join the academicians in selecting the new members. This election resulted in more entries than in previous years.

The average age of the new academicians of the CAS is 54.7 years old, with the youngest being 45 and the oldest 65. Five of them are women. The new members of the CAE are on average 58.2 years old, with the youngest being 48 and the oldest 76.

Many of the new academicians have won national science and technology awards and made great breakthroughs in scientific research or new product development in recent years.

Zheng Hairong, a new member of the CAS, led a scientific team to develop a magnetic resonance imaging equipment project that won the first prize of the 2020 National Science and Technology Progress Awards.

The extracorporeal membrane oxygenation device developed by Zheng’s team is the first China-made equipment of its kind approved for marketing and played a key role in the medical treatment of Covid-19 patients with severe symptoms.

Yan Ning, another new member of the CAS, is a famous structural biologist and a foreign academician of the US National Academy of Sciences. She resigned as a teacher at Princeton University in the US and returned to China to prepare for establishing medical research center Shenzhen Medical Academy of Research and Translation in December last year.

SMART was officially set up on Nov. 21 this year, with Yan serving as the founding president.

The mission of SMART is to explore a new scheme encouraging original innovation, bringing in and training high-level talents, and breaking the invisible wall between original technology innovation and clinical medical science research in the field of life health, Yan said at the inauguration meeting for the center.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Futura Costaglione