Elected Academician of the International Eurasian Academy of Sciences in 2008, Professor Nanming Zhao is a Chinese biophysicist whose career has combined research in membrane biophysics with institution building in life sciences and medical education at Tsinghua University. Born in Kaihua County, Zhejiang Province, in 1939, he entered the Department of Engineering Physics at Tsinghua University in 1956 and graduated in 1962. In 1978, he was among the first group of Chinese visiting scholars sent to the United States after the beginning of China’s reform and opening up. His study at Georgetown University and the University of California, Berkeley, led him to retrain in biophysics at the University of California, Irvine. Returning to Tsinghua in 1981, he joined efforts to rebuild the university’s biology programme and subsequently served as Executive Deputy Head and Head of the Department of Biology. He was appointed Professor in 1985 and Doctoral Supervisor in 1987, and served as Director of the State Key Laboratory of Biomembrane and Membrane Biotechnology from 1991 to 1997. He also held visiting professorships at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and Osaka University. In 1994, he founded the Tsinghua Institute of Life Science and Bioengineering and served as its Director until 2003. Following the establishment of Tsinghua’s School of Medicine in 2001, he served as Executive Vice Dean and subsequently as Director of its Institute of Life Science and Medicine. He was President of the Biophysical Society of China from 1998 to 2006 and served on the Council of the International Union for Pure and Applied Biophysics. His honours include national awards for scientific and technological contributions, the Outstanding Contribution Award of Tsinghua University, and the Bei Shizhang Prize of the Biophysical Society of China.