Pei has been appointed chair professor and director of the Institute of Applied Physics and Materials Engineering at the University of Macau and began attending events in his new role in March, as reported by the South China Morning Post.

Before the move, Pei was a professor of materials science and engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and also held a faculty appointment in mechanical and aerospace engineering.

He has published more than 250 peer-reviewed papers and holds 47 U.S. patents. In 2023, he received the Smart Structures and Materials Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for Optics and Photonics for his contributions to the field.

Chinese materials scientist Pei Qibing. Photo courtesy of University of Macau

Pei's academic journey began in Anhui province, eastern China, where he attended a small rural school on an island in the Yangtze River. He and his older sister studied in the same class because there were not enough students to form separate grades.

"Because the school did not have enough chairs, students needed to bring their own stools," his former classmate Wang Xianglong told local media in comments cited by the South China Morning Post.

Wang said Pei consistently ranked at the top of his class before enrolling at Nanjing University in 1981 to study chemistry.

After earning his bachelor's degree, he completed a PhD at the Institute of Chemistry under the Chinese Academy of Sciences before moving overseas in 1990. He first conducted postdoctoral research at Linkoping University in Sweden before relocating to the U.S. in 1994.

In the U.S., he worked as a senior chemist at Uniax Corporation, which was later acquired by DuPont, and later as a senior research engineer at SRI International in Menlo Park, California. At Uniax, he worked under Nobel Prize-winning chemist Alan Heeger on light-emitting semiconductor technologies.

Pei joined UCLA's Department of Materials Science and Engineering as an associate professor in 2004 and later became a full professor. At UCLA, he directed the Soft Materials Research Laboratory, whose research focuses on artificial muscles, flexible electronics, nanostructured materials and conjugated polymers, according to his university profile.