(FILE)

Rao Yi, Dean of the School of Life Sciences of Peking University and also a prestigious neuroscientist, attracted people's attention because he was not selected as an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Rao later said in his blog he would never apply for the title in the future.

Rao, 49, graduated from Shanghai Medical University with a master's degree in 1985, and from the University of California at San Francisco with a doctoral degree in neuroscience in 1991.

From 1996, he was a part-time researcher at the CAS. In 1999, he helped establish the Institute of Neuroscience at the CAS. In 2007, Rao came back from the United States to be the dean of the School of Life Sciences at Peking University and senior researcher at China's National Institute of Biological Sciences.

Rao is widely known for his controversial remarks on China's education system and the fraught atmosphere of scientific research. He once voiced the criticism that research funds are allocated based more on relationships than on the level of scientific research. He said this was a total waste of resources and would hamper creativity and innovation in science.