John Z. SHI was born in Jiangsu Province in 1965. He obtained a Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) from the University of Nanjing in 1986 and was awarded a Sino-British Friendship Scholarship Scheme in 1987, subsequently gaining a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) from the University of Wales in 1992. He became a Full Professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 1998 and was a recipient of the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars awarded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China in 2002. He was appointed a Distinguished Professor at the School of Ocean and Civil Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, in 2009. He spent two Michaelmas terms in 2012 and 2019 at the G.K. Batchelor Laboratory, the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, the University of Cambridge, U.K. He was awarded a Senior Visitor by Emmanuel College Cambridge in 2019 and was elected a Visiting Fellow at Wolfson College Cambridge in 2019.