Recently, the Award Committee of the European Federation of Corrosion passed the review and approved the award of the Honorary Fellow of the European Federation of Corrosion in 2021 to Professor Xiaogang Li, from the Institute for Advanced Material and Technology, University of Science and Technology Beijing, in recognition of his longstanding contribution in the field of global corrosion science and engineering.

As the world's largest corrosion academic organization, the European Federation of Corrosion was established in 1955. The secretariat is located in London, Frankfurt, Germany and Paris, France. It is composed of 38 corrosion societies and professional institutions from 25 countries, representing the broad interests of more than 25,000 corrosion scientists and engineers in the world. The title of Honorary Fellow of the European Federation of Corrosion was established in 2015. It is one of the highest academic honors of the society and the competition is extremely fierce. From 2015 to 2019, only 7 scholars from Belgium, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, and France won this honor, including Professor Anthony Bubai, a well-known expert in the field of corrosion. Professor Li’s award is the first time that the European Federation of Corrosion has awarded the honor to scholars outside the EU countries.

Xiaogang Li is the professor of University of Science and Technology Beijing, Director of the National Materials Corrosion and Protection Data Center, Head of the Material Service Big Data Technology Team of Beijing Material Genetic Engineering High-precision Innovation Center, chief scientist of the 973 project "Key Technology Foundation of Corrosion and Protection of Marine Engineering Equipment Materials". He is also the executive vice chairman of the Chinese Society of Corrosion and Protection, and an Advisory Editorial Board of the internationally renowned journal "Corrosion Science". He has been engaged in material corrosion and corrosion-resistant steel metallurgical engineering research for a long time, put forward the academic viewpoint and research system of material corrosion big data, and developed a series of intelligent monitoring technology and database technology of material big data. He systematically obtained the influence law of alloy composition and metallurgical process parameters on the origin and evolution mechanism of low-alloy steel environmental corrosion, proposed a new idea for the design and control of low-alloy corrosion-resistant steel composition that conforms to the full life cycle of the typical service environment, established new theory of metallurgical full-process control of corrosion resistance of low-alloy steel; invented a series of new low-alloy corrosion-resistant steel grades and realized industrialized production; developed a new standard system for high-quality low-alloy corrosion-resistant steel, solved a number of corrosion problems of steel materials in major national projects. He won 2 second prizes of National Science and Technology Progress Award as the first author and won the W.R. Whitney Supreme Academic Award, the Technical Achievement Award and the Honorary Fellow title of the National Association of Corrosion Engineers ( NACE ).