Shu-Kun Lin was born in Hanchuan, Hubei Province, China. He graduated with a BSc from Wuhan University in January 1982, majoring in inorganic chemistry; he studied physical chemistry in the Lanzhou Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (1982–1986, MSc in 1985) and in the USA (University of Louisville, 1987–1989). He received his doctorate (organic chemistry) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH-Zürich) in 1992 after studying for 3.5 years in the group of Prof. Dr. Bernhard Jaun, Laboratory of Organic Chemistry. He then worked at Ciba-Geigy Ltd. for three years. In 1996, Shu-Kun Lin initiated the samples collection and exchange project, and founded the international organization MDPI in Switzerland, to implement this. In the same year he launched the first MDPI journal Molecules. In 2001 he became a professor at the Ocean University of China (OUC). He is the founder or co-founder of several other open-access journals.
