Professor Yao Shouzhuo (1936- ), a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a specialist in radioactive chemistry, was elected academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1999.

He was born in Songjiang, Shanghai. He began to work in Changsha, Hunan Province since 1960s. He was enrolled in Nankai University in 1952 and studied in the Department of Chemistry of University of Leningrad in Soviet Union in 1954. He returned from abroad in 1959.

Professor Yao has been a teacher in Tsinghua University and Hunan University. In recent years, He has accomplished a series of fruitful innovative work in research on Chinese herbal medicine, developing dozens of standard products with the effect of Chinese herbal medicine and related standard analytical methods.

Professor Yao has filed four invention patent applications, among which one has won the national approval and 4 met the official drug standard implemented by the Ministry of Health. He has published over 400 papers included in Science Citation Index (SCI) and they have been cited for more than 800 times. 4 monographs have been worked out by him.

His research programs have won 9 awards including the prize for National Nature Sciences, the National Science & Technology Progress Award, awards at first or second rank at ministerial and provincial levels.