5.10. Zhaolun Fang and FIA in China
Shu-Kun Xu
Zhaolun Fang, the founder of FIA association of China
Zhaolun Fang graduated from the Department of Chemistry, Peking University in 1957. He started working as a research assistant in the Institute of Forestry and Soil Science in Shenyang, Chinese Academy of Sciences, until 1965 when he was promoted to research associate. He was promoted to associate professor in 1977 and to full Professor in 1986 while at the Institute, which was then renamed the Institute of Applied Ecology, where he founded the Flow Injection Analysis Research Center in 1989. In 1996 he moved to Northeastern University and founded the Research Center for Analytical Sciences. Zhaolun Fang was elected a Member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1997. In 2000, he founded another institute: the Institute of Microanalytical Systems in the Department of Chemistry, Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China.
Fang's major research areas in flow analysis included flow injection and sequential injection methods and techniques for on-line separation, preconcentration, atomic spectrometry, and capillary electrophoresis; microfluidic analytical systems; and applications in environmental, biological and pharmaceutical analysis. He is the author or co-author of more than 300 scientific papers and 6 monographs, including two monographs on flow injection analysis in English, <Flow Injection Separation and Preconcentration> published by VCH, 1993, and <Flow Injection Atomic Absorption Spectrometry> published by John Wiley & Sons, 1995. Due to his research results in flow analysis, he received the third prize of State Natural Science Award in 1995 by Flow injection separation and hyphenation new metods, the first prize of Natural Science Award of the Ministry of Education of China in 2007 by "Studies on the new techniques in Flow analysis", numerous prizes from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the first Haiguang Award for Analytical Chemistry in 1994.
Zhaolun Fang served as an Editorial Board member for Lab on a Chip, and became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He also served as Editorial Board or Editorial Advisory Board member for a variety of other international journals including Talanta, and Analytica Chimica Acta. In 2007. While Fang was in hospital, he initiated and organized the First Shenyang International Colloquium on Microfluidics, which proved to be a great success in promoting microfluidic research across China and the world.
Zhao-lun Fang passed away on 12th Nov 2007. He is remembered as an enthusiastic and knowledgeable scientist with many academic accomplishments at home and internationally. He is the pioneer and founder of flow analysis in China.