From a child crouching by the paddy field watching ants, to a zoologist who has travelled the world.
Chen Rui was born in 1987 in Sanming, Fujian. He was four years old before he said his first word. While other children played, he would spend whole afternoons alone by the edge of a field, watching ants build nests and carry food — a near-solitary obsession with the natural world that would define his entire life.
In 2006, as a first-year student at Nanjing Agricultural University, he founded the campus's first entomology club, which grew to nearly 600 members. By his third year he had already published his first SCI paper in ornithology. In 2010 he was admitted directly to the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences to pursue a PhD in Zoology, and joined the Institute of Zoology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2016.
He currently serves as Secretary-General of the Chinese Society of Scientific Expeditions — a national academic society established in 1989 that organised China's first civilian Arctic and Antarctic expeditions — and as Founder and Director of the Paleodiary Science Team, China's first natural-science education organisation staffed entirely by career scientists. He was among the first Chinese scientists to venture deep into the Amazon jungle, and his expeditions have taken him to nearly a hundred countries and territories.
His taxonomic research has discovered and described approximately one hundred new species, several of which bear his name — including the amber fossil beetle Spinotoma ruicheni. In 2021 he and colleagues published the world's first shrimp amber fossil: a specimen from Mexico dating back some 22 million years. His team also recorded the world's first snake amber. His amber collection is housed at the Insect History Museum in his hometown of Sanming, Fujian, and has been certified by the Da Shijie Guinness Record as the largest personal insect amber collection in the world.
