Prof. HE Shunping (Credit: IHB)

On November 21, 2025, the Chinese Academy of Sciences announced its list of newly elected academicians, with Prof. HE Shunping from the Institute of Hydrobiology (IHB) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences being elected as a member in the Division of Life and Medical Sciences. 

Prof. He was born in December 1962 in Luzhou, Sichuan Province. He is a recipient of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Talent Program and a Distinguished Young Scholar of the National Natural Science Foundation of China. He has long been engaged in research on fish taxonomy, biogeography, and evolutionary biology. Currently, he serves as the president of the Ichthyological Society of China Zoological Society. 

Building on a long-standing foundation in systematic taxonomy, Prof. He has continuously adopted new methodologies to advance fish taxonomy research across three dimensions: patterns, processes, and mechanisms. He has achieved systematic and innovative results in areas such as the adaptation of deep-sea fish to extreme environments, the genetic innovations underlying vertebrate terrestrialization, and the evolutionary systematics of freshwater fish in East Asia. 

Over the past four decades, Prof. He has published more than 270 papers, including publications as corresponding or co-corresponding author in top-tier journals such as Cell (three articles), Nature Ecology & Evolution, and National Science Review. His work has been cited over 7,290 times, with an H-index of 54. He has authored two monographs and holds five authorized invention patents. He has been recognized as a Highly Cited Researcher by Elsevier for four consecutive years (2021–2024), reflecting broad acknowledgment of his academic achievements within the domestic and international scientific community. In 2024, he was awarded the Ho Leung Ho Lee Foundation Prize for Scientific and Technological Progress.

To establish a global research platform for fish species and genomic diversity, he initiated the Fish10K, which aims to cover one-third of the world's fish species and reconstruct their taxonomic and evolutionary relationships. This initiative has attracted significant attention from the international scientific community and has been integrated into the Earth BioGenome Project (EBP) and the Vertebrate Genomes Project (VGP). He serves as the chair of the Northeast Asia region for the International Fish DNA Barcoding Committee and holds editorial board positions for publications such as Fauna Sinica, Journal of Hydrobiology, Science China Life Sciences, Journal of Systematics and Evolution, and Water Biology and Security.