Anyuan Cao is a professor and Ph.D. supervisor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering, Peking University. 

He received his Ph.D. degree from the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Tsinghua University in 2001, and was a postdoctoral researcher at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the U.S. in 2002-05, and an assistant professor at the University of Hawaii in the U.S. in 2005-08. He returned to China and joined the Department of Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, School of Engineering, Peking University in 2009 and transferred to the School of Materials in 2020.

His research interests include the controlled synthesis of carbon nanotubes and their composites, energy and environmental applications, etc. His representative achievements include the world's smallest carbon nanotube brushes, organic blowing bubbles for the orderly self-assembly of nanomaterials, 3D porous carbon nanotube sponges and energy storage electrodes, etc. He has published more than 200 academic papers in Science, Nature Nanotechnology and other journals, and has been awarded the National Outstanding Youth Science Foundation, the Ministry of Science and Technology's Young and Middle-aged Science and Technology Innovation Leaders, the NSF CAREER Award, the Peking University Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Supervisor, the Peking University Outstanding Teaching Award, and the Peking University Cai Yuanpei Fellowship for Beauty and Education. He is currently a member of the Chinese Society for Materials Research (CSR) for nanomaterials. Currently, he is also a director of the Nanomaterials and Devices Branch of the Chinese Society for Materials Research, and a member of the Composites Expert Committee of the National Think Tank of Materials and Devices Scientists.