The ordered mesoporous polymer catalysts developed by the team of Academician Zhao Dongyuan from Fudan University have been successfully applied in a large-scale biomass refinery. These catalysts can efficiently convert lignin from agricultural waste biomass such as crop straw into high-value aromatic chemicals, with catalytic efficiency several times higher than that of traditional industrial catalysts, thereby promoting the development of a circular economy.

Professor Zhao Dongyuan is an Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS), and a physical chemist. He received his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees from Jilin University in 1984, 1987, and 1990, respectively. He then served as a lecturer and associate professor at Shenyang Institute of Chemical Technology. From 1993 to 1998, he conducted postdoctoral research at the Weizmann Institute of Science, the University of Houston, and the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 1998, he became a professor in the Department of Chemistry at Fudan University, and in June 2022, he was appointed Dean of the Institute of Energy Materials at Inner Mongolia University. His research focuses on the controllable synthesis and application of mesoporous materials and nano-functional materials, having achieved a series of innovative research results. He has published over 800 papers in top-tier journals including Science, Nature, Nature Materials, Nature Chemistry, Nature Communications, Science Advances, JACS, Angewandte Chemie, and Advanced Materials, with over 150,000 citations and an H-index of 193. He has received numerous prestigious awards, including the First Prize of the National Natural Science Award, the Second Prize of the National Natural Science Award, the Ho Leung Ho Lee Foundation Prize for Scientific and Technological Progress, the Chinese Chemical Society Award for Contribution to Chemistry, the Chinese Zeolite Achievement Award, and the International Mesostructured Materials Association Achievement Award. Since 2012, he has been continuously listed by Clarivate Analytics as a Highly Cited Researcher in the fields of chemistry and materials science, and ranked by Stanford University's School of Statistics among the Top 1000 scientists globally across all fields. He currently serves as an Executive Editor of ACS Central Science and an Associate Editor of the National Science Review.