On September 12, 2024, at the closing ceremony of the 22nd World Congress of Food Science and Technology held in Rimini, Italy, the International Academy of Food Science and Technology (IAFoST) announced that after review by the evaluation committee, among candidates from countries such as China, Japan, the Netherlands, Turkey, and Portugal, Professor Rao Pingfan, director of the Academic Committee of the R & D Center, was elected as the president-elect of the International Academy of Food Science and Technology with a high number of votes. This is the first president of this international academic organization from Asia and especially the first from China. It is also a great victory for China's food science community, marking the leading position of China's food science on a global scale. Recently, this appointment has been officially announced.

Rao was born in 1957 and is from Fuzhou, Fujian Province. He is the former vice president of Fuzhou University, the founding director of the Joint Research Center for Food Nutrition of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Zhejiang Gongshang University, a doctor and professor. He is a candidate for the " National Hundred, Thousand and Ten Thousand Talent Project in the New Century". He is the former chairman of the International Food Union, an academician of the International Academy of Food Science and Technology, an honorary vice chairman of the Chinese Institute of Food Science and Technology, and the editor-in-chief of Nature's subsidiary journal npj Science of Food. He is also a distinguished professor at Fujian Polytechnic Normal University, Queen's University Belfast and other universities, and the director of the Academic Committee of the Fujian-Indonesia Marine Food Joint Research and Development Center. Professor Rao Pingfan has long been engaged in basic and applied research such as the supramolecular structure-activity mechanism of food and traditional Chinese medicine and the research on the superoxide free radical channel in the body. Having taught for 35 years, he has cultivated thousands of students and dedicated his youth to the cause of science and education in food science and life and health in China.