The results of the 2025 election for academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering have been announced—four new academicians from the field of acoustics have been elected to the Chinese Academy of Sciences!

On November 21, 2025, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering officially announced the results of the 2025 academician election. In the field of acoustics and related interdisciplinary areas, there was exciting news: Liu Zhengyou, Chen Yanfeng, Wang Haibin, and Yang Kunde—four scholars—were successfully elected as academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, thanks to their systematic and pioneering groundbreaking research achievements in the field of acoustics. This breakthrough not only marks a milestone in the academic careers of these four scholars but also signifies that China’s acoustics discipline has reached a whole new level of development, injecting strong impetus into the innovative growth of the industry.

As an authoritative trade and exchange platform in the field of acoustics, CAAF China Acoustic Expo has always closely monitored cutting-edge industry trends and the growth of top-tier talent. The election of these four academicians not only recognizes their many years of dedicated work in the field of acoustics and their remarkable achievements in overcoming numerous technical challenges, but also provides solid talent support for the high-quality development of China’s acoustic industry.

Professor Liu Zhengyou has long been dedicated to fundamental research on acoustic wave manipulation in artificial structures. He is one of the earliest scholars in China to conduct research on phononic crystals and acoustic metamaterials. In three-dimensional phononic crystals, he successfully demonstrated a complete acoustic bandgap and, through defect engineering techniques, achieved localized confinement and guided propagation of sound waves, laying a crucial experimental foundation for the development of acoustic filters and waveguide devices. His team was among the first internationally to experimentally realize acoustic metamaterial units with negative effective parameters, precisely verifying the phenomenon of negative refraction of sound waves and thus breaking the boundaries of conventional acoustic theory.

In recent years, Professor Liu Zhengyou has innovatively introduced topological physics concepts into classical acoustic systems, experimentally observing for the first time acoustic valley Hall edge states and higher-order topological corner states. These findings reveal the robust transmission properties of sound waves at structural boundaries or corners, providing a brand-new approach for the design of novel acoustic functional devices.

In 2025, their team, in collaboration with Changsha University of Science and Technology, observed for the first time in two-dimensional non-reciprocal phononic crystals the "mixed-order non-Hermitian skin effect"—that is, the simultaneous presence of first-order "boundary skin effect" and second-order "corner skin effect" within the same system. In addition, the team also observed this phenomenon in three-dimensional phononic crystals. Surface-dependent skin effect. These findings enrich the understanding of non-Hermitian topological physics and offer new insights for the design of novel acoustic devices.

To date, Professor Liu Zhengyou has published over 200 papers in top-tier journals such as Science, Nature, and Physical Review Letters. His total citations on Google Scholar exceed 20,000, with a single paper receiving as many as 6,000 citations. He has been consistently listed on Elsevier’s China’s Highly Cited Scholars List over the years. He has received the Second Prize of the National Natural Science Award and the Brillouin Prize from the International Phonon Society. Currently, he serves as an editorial board member of Physical Review Letters and as a Divisional Associate Editor (DAE). He also holds editorial positions on prestigious journals including Chinese Physics Letters, National Science Review, and Science Bulletin.

A leader in acoustic functional materials, tackling the challenges of low-frequency noise control and acoustic detection.

Professor Chen Yanfeng, with materials physics as his core research foundation, focuses on the mechanisms by which artificial microstructures control sound waves and their engineering applications. Addressing the long-standing challenge of low-frequency noise control faced by industry, he has proposed innovative design strategies such as multi-scale resonance coupling and gradient impedance matching. As a result, he has developed lightweight composite materials that exhibit highly efficient sound absorption and insulation in the frequency range from hundreds of hertz to thousands of hertz. These materials significantly outperform conventional porous absorbers in low-frequency performance, offering a groundbreaking solution for noise control in fields such as construction and transportation.

In the field of acoustic detection technology, Professor Chen Yanfeng has efficiently integrated piezoelectric materials with acoustic metamaterials, successfully developing a prototype acoustic sensor with wide-frequency response and high sensitivity. Building on this achievement, he has independently developed full-band acoustic detection instruments and equipment, filling a domestic technological gap in this area.

In November 2025, its team will collaborate with Shandong University on an international level. For the first time, a quasiparticle called “EPPTON”—a coupling of electrons, phonons, and photons—has been discovered in a laser crystal system exhibiting optical nonlinear effects. This research... We have overcome the long-standing challenge of efficiently coupling three types of particles that differ dramatically in energy and momentum scales. It has opened up entirely new research directions in cutting-edge fields such as phonon-coupled laser physics and adaptive nonlinear optics. 。

Professor Chen Yanfeng has published over 300 SCI papers in domestic and international journals, including Science, Nature and its sub-journals, Phys. Rev. Lett., and NSR. He was named on the 2024 Clarivate “Global Highly Cited Researchers” list. He holds more than 70 Chinese patents and 2 U.S. patents. He received the “Ye Qisun Physics Award” from the Chinese Physical Society for the 2012-2013 academic year, the Second Prize of the National Natural Science Award in 2015 (as the first author), and was nominated twice—first in 2019 and again in 2021—as a preliminary candidate for election to the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In November 2025, he was elected as an Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Professor Wang Haibin

A leading expert in underwater acoustic communication, building China’s independent long-distance communication technology system.

Research areas: Underwater acoustic communication, ocean information transmission, underwater acoustic systems engineering

Professor Wang Haibin, Researcher at the Institute of Acoustics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Director of the National Key Laboratory of Acoustics and Ocean Information

Professor Wang Haibin is a leading figure in China’s research on the theory, technology, and engineering of hydroacoustics. Addressing global technical bottlenecks—such as severe multipath interference, bandwidth limitations, and strong environmental noise—in long-distance deep-sea communications, he innovatively proposed a channel-adaptive modulation-and-coding scheme, a low-complexity equalization algorithm, and a hydroacoustic MIMO architecture, significantly enhancing the data rate and link reliability of underwater acoustic communications.

As the chief technical officer, Professor Wang Haibin led the establishment of China’s first remote underwater acoustic communication theoretical and technological system with completely independent intellectual property rights. The series of underwater acoustic communication devices he developed have successfully enabled high-speed data exchange among key platforms such as seabed observation networks, deep-sea buoys, and AUVs. These equipment have been deployed and applied in numerous national-level marine monitoring and defense missions, providing a core guarantee for the security of China’s marine information transmission.

To date, Professor Wang Haibin has published over 100 papers and been granted more than 40 invention patents. As the primary contributor, he has won four major awards: the Second Prize of the National Technological Invention Award, the National Innovation and Pioneering Award, the First Prize of the Military Technological Invention Award, and the First Prize of the Military Science and Technology Progress Award. He currently serves as an editorial board member for journals such as "Acta Acustica" and "Acoustic Technology," continuously contributing to the academic advancement of the field of underwater acoustics.

Professor Yang Kunde

A pioneer in marine acoustics, tackling the challenging task of target detection in complex environments.

Professor Yang Kunde has long been focused on research into acoustic field modeling and target detection methods in complex marine environments. Addressing the technical challenge of strong reverberation in shallow seas, he has developed a signal separation model based on sparse representation and compressed sensing, which effectively suppresses reverberation interference. At the same time, he has actively explored the application of deep learning in acoustic feature extraction and target classification, significantly enhancing detection performance under low signal-to-noise ratio conditions and providing crucial support for breakthroughs in underwater target detection technology.

In the field of long-range ocean acoustic detection, Professor Yang Kunde has participated in the development of an over-the-horizon acoustic information transmission technology for marine applications. This technology fully leverages the oceanic sound channel waveguide effect to achieve stable propagation of acoustic signals over distances of up to hundreds of kilometers. He led the organization and completion of seven national key special projects involving marine acoustic surveys, acquiring vast amounts of measured data that have been used for model validation and algorithm optimization, thereby providing solid data support for the refinement of China’s marine acoustic theoretical framework.

Professor Yang Kunde has published over 210 SCI papers, been granted more than 110 invention patents, and authored 6 monographs. As the primary contributor, he has received numerous prestigious awards, including the Second Prize of the National Technology Invention Award and the Third National Innovation and Excellence Award. He has been selected for a national-level major talent program and has led his team to win honors such as the Innovation Team Award from the China Shipbuilding Engineering Society and the Shaanxi Province Science and Technology Innovation Team Award. Currently, he serves as an editorial board member of the journals "Acta Acustica" and "Acoustic Technology," making outstanding contributions to talent development and technological innovation in China's marine acoustics field.