The Academician Workstation is an initiative of the China Association for Science and Technology (CAST) to enhance China’s independent innovation capacity, build an innovation-driven nation, and implement the talent-strong country strategy. It mobilizes a broad community of S&T professionals to serve localities and enterprises and promotes industry–university–research collaboration in creative and effective ways. In line with the National Medium- and Long-Term Talent Development Plan (2010–2020), the workstation leverages CAST’s organizational strengths to advance policies for cultivating innovative talent through collaborative mechanisms, concentrate efforts in practice, train high-level and innovative professionals, and build a large innovation-oriented S&T workforce—serving socio-economic development and supporting enterprise technological innovation.

An Academician Workstation is an innovation-oriented research platform jointly established by enterprises and universities or research institutes together with academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences or the Chinese Academy of Engineering and their teams. Its core mission is to draw on academicians’ intellectual resources to solve key technological bottlenecks in industry and accelerate the commercialization of scientific and technological achievements. By 2023, China had set up more than 5,000 such workstations across fields including high-end manufacturing, biomedicine, and new energy, making them an important driver of industrial upgrading.

The Duan Guangren Academician Workstation was approved by the Guangdong Association for Science and Technology in January 2025.

The workstation will further consolidate and systematize the core theoretical framework of the Fully Actuated System (FAS) theory, leading advances in international control theory and control technologies. In parallel, it will apply state-of-the-art control methods to domains such as spacecraft control and intelligent robotics to address critical “chokepoint” problems. These efforts will raise the overall technological level of the Greater Bay Area’s automation sector, promote the localization of key core technologies in Guangdong’s automation industry, and drive the rapid development of high-end automation industries.