Lu, who has led the NUS department since 2021, told the South China Morning Post he will move to the Eastern Institute of Technology in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, in a full-time role, and will hold his teaching, research and management posts at NUS until he goes.

NUS placed eighth in the QS World University Rankings 2026, the only Asian university in the global top 10 and the highest-ranked in Singapore. It lists Lu as a Provost's Chair Professor for 2025 to 2028, president of the Singapore National Institute of Chemistry since 2025, and a fellow of the Singapore National Academy of Science since 2022.

His exit follows that of K. Jimmy Hsia, the former vice-president and founding dean of the graduate college at Nanyang Technological University, who joined EIT on Aug. 1, according to ScienceNet, the news service of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

EIT was approved as a degree-granting private university by China's Ministry of Education in June 2025 and inaugurated that November. The SCMP has reported that it has more faculty members than undergraduate students.

Its founding president is Chen Shiyi, a Chinese Academy of Sciences academician who led the Southern University of Science and Technology from 2015 to 2020 and previously chaired mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins University.

The school is funded by Yu Renrong, the Ningbo-born founder of chipmaker Will Semiconductor, who Forbes reports has pledged a total of 30 billion yuan (US$4.5 billion) to it over time.

Caixin reported that Yu's contributions and pledges through 2024 reached 5.26 billion yuan, making EIT one of the two largest recipients of Chinese philanthropic giving to higher education that year.

The Eastern Institute of Technology, Ningbo, China. Photo courtesy of THE

Lu told the SCMP that EIT was "at a critical stage of rapid development" and that watching it grow into a world-class institution was "a meaningful challenge that I cannot refuse."

He held long conversations with Chen and other EIT colleagues while weighing the move, he said, and shared their aim of building a small, research-led university from the outset.

Ningbo's manufacturing base and the surrounding Yangtze River Delta, which concentrates universities, research institutes and technology firms, offer a route from laboratory work to commercial application, he told the newspaper.

Chemistry "is not only an important component of basic sciences but is also closely related to application fields such as materials, medicine, energy, and advanced manufacturing," he said, describing an environment that "combines academic potential with industrial support."

Lu studied chemistry at Fudan University and took a master's degree at Dalian University of Technology before completing a PhD in organic chemistry at McGill University in Canada in 2000 under George Just, according to NUS.

He then did postdoctoral work with Peter Schiller at the Clinical Research Institute of Montreal and held a fellowship at Nagoya University under Ryoji Noyori, the 2001 Nobel laureate in chemistry, whose prize was for advances in asymmetric catalysis, the field Lu has worked in since.

He joined NUS in September 2003, was tenured in 2010 and promoted to full professor in 2014.

His work spans organocatalysis, transition metal catalysis and photocatalysis, using catalysts to assemble target molecules for pharmaceuticals along shorter and cheaper synthetic routes.

NUS lists his honors as the National Research Foundation Investigatorship Award in 2018, the Asian Core Program Lectureship Award five times between 2009 and 2016, the GSK-SNIC Award in Organic Chemistry in 2013, and the Faculty of Science Outstanding Scientist and Young Scientist awards in 2013 and 2009.

"Singapore, and NUS in particular, is where I have worked and lived for over 20 years," he told the SCMP, citing long-term collaborators, friends and former students there.

At EIT he plans to continue work on asymmetric catalysis with an emphasis on biomedicine and sustainable chemistry, and to build an interdisciplinary research platform.