Fu Xiaolan

Introduction

Fu Xiaolan (傅小兰, born 1963) studies the face — and built the apparatus that lets machines and scientists read it. As founder of the micro-expression research program at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Psychology, she produced the CASME databases of spontaneous micro-expressions that became international standards for affective computing and deception research; as the Institute's director from 2010 to 2024, she ran the country's flagship psychology institution through its largest expansion; and in 2017 she became the first woman to preside over the Chinese Psychological Society in its century of existence. Her own science ranges across emotion, lying, and digital-footprint psychology, written up for both journals and the public in books such as The Psychology of Lying. In 2024 she left the Institute to become founding dean of Shanghai Jiao Tong University's new School of Psychology, built around psychology and artificial intelligence.

Early Life and Education

Fu was born in 1963 (in Hunan, by most accounts). She took her bachelor's (1984) and master's (1987, under Wang Su) in psychology at Peking University, and her doctorate at the CAS Institute of Psychology in 1990 — advised by Pan Shu and Jing Qicheng, the discipline's founding generation — with visiting years at the University of Michigan's cognitive science laboratory (1994–96).

Academic and Professional Career

She rose at the Institute of Psychology from assistant researcher (1990) to professor (1997), deputy director (2006–10) and director (July 2010 – January 2024), while heading the psychology department of the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences. She was elected president of the Chinese Psychological Society in November 2017 and continued into its thirteenth council before handing over to Su Yanjie in October 2023. Her honors include the State Council special allowance and the National March-8 Red-Banner Pacesetter title; her public-facing editorship of the Mental Health Blue Book series (2017–22) made the Institute's national survey findings an annual news event. In April 2024 she became founding dean of Shanghai Jiao Tong University's School of Psychology.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Micro-expressions as measurable science

Her laboratory's spontaneous micro-expression databases (CASME, CASME II, CAS(ME)² and successors) turned a shy branch of emotion research into a benchmark field for computer vision and psychology jointly — the rare case of a Chinese laboratory setting the shared data infrastructure for an international subfield.

The discipline's public voice

Between the Blue Book, the presidency, and her books on lying and emotion, Fu made psychological evidence part of Chinese public life — and, as the first woman to run both the Institute and the Society, redrew who the discipline's institutional face could be.