The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) announced that 35 prominent scientists have been elected academicians on December 4, 2009, totaling the number of CAS' academicians to 714. Prof. Xi Nanhua from AMSS got elected.

Prof. Xi Nanhua  was born in Guangdong province in 1963. He graduated from Huaihua Institute as a college student in 1981, received a MS. Degree in 1985 and a Ph.D. degree in 1988, both from East China Normal University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Mathematics, CAS during 1988-1989. His research interests are Algebraic Groups and Quantum Groups.

Here are some of his selected works. 1) Proved Lusztig's conjecture on based ring of a two-sided cell for affine Weyl groups of type A; 2) Determined the necessary and sufficient condition for the validity of Deligne-Langlands conjecture for affine Hecke algebras; 3) Showed that the finite dimensional representations of quantum groups over a field of characteristic p with parameter not being a root of unity behave similar to those of algebraic groups over a field of characteristic 0; 4) Obtained an explicit and concrete realization for finite dimensional irreducible representations of quantum groups at roots of unity; 5) Joint with Chari, constructed monomial bases of quantum groups; 6) Calculated some canonical bases; 7) Obtained a commutation formula for root vectors; 8)Joint with Lusztig, discovered canonical left cells; 9) Joint with Tanisaki, proved that for an affine Hecke algebra of type A, a certain geometric filtration and a certain algebraic filtration coincide.

He recieved a Morningside Silver Medal of Mathematics from the International Congress of Chinese Mathematicians in 2001, Shiing-Shen Chern Prize in 2005 from the Chinese Mathematical Society and a second class award of the National Natural Sciences Award, China, in 2007.

 CAS academician title is the most eminent academic honor in China. New members were added every two years, with a quota of no more than 60 for each election.