Professor LAI Kin Keung, who holds a Ph.D. from Michigan State University, is a Distinguished Professor and Doctoral Supervisor at the International Business School of Shaanxi Normal University. He also serves as the Director of the Academic Committee for the university's "Poverty Alleviation Policy and Evaluation Research Center" (a CTTI National Think Tank) and the "Rural Revitalization Research Institute."

Professor Lai has previously worked at Cathay Pacific Airways (Hong Kong), Union Carbide Asia (Hong Kong), and City University of Hong Kong. His extensive academic leadership includes serving as Dean of the Business School at Hunan University, Adjunct Professor at the Institute of Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Adjunct Professor at the School of Management, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, and Chair Professor at North China Electric Power University. He is also the President of the Asian Crisis and Risk Management Association and a former professor at the College of Business, City University of Hong Kong. He has served as Editor-in-Chief or Guest Editor for 18 prominent international journals. In 2006, he was recognized as one of China's Top 10 Most Influential Management Gurus. In 2017, he was elected as a Fellow of the International Academy for Systems and Cybernetic Sciences (IASCYS) in recognition of his outstanding research contributions to the fields of systems and cybernetic sciences.

Elsevier's CiteScore impact factor for 2020 reported Light: Science & Applications at 21.4. Elsevier has created a publicly available database of the most-cited scientists, providing standardized information on citation metrics including the h-index, the hm-index adjusting for co-authorship, citation counts for papers with different authorship positions, and a composite indicator (c-score). The database presents both career-long data and single-year impact metrics. Indicators are provided both with and without self-citations, as well as the proportion of citations to cited papers. Scientists are categorized into 22 scientific fields and 176 sub-fields. Percentile rankings within their specific field and sub-field are provided for all scientists with at least five papers. The career-long data is updated through the end of 2021, while the single-year data pertains to citations received during the 2021 calendar year. The selection is based on a c-score (with or without self-citations) or a percentile rank of 2% or higher within their sub-field, placing scientists among the top 100,000. A total of 195,605 scientists are included in the career-long database, and 200,409 in the single-year dataset. Professor LAI Kin Keung's inclusion on behalf of Shaanxi Normal University in Elsevier's 2022 list of the world's top 2% most influential scientists marks him as the only selected scholar from the humanities and social sciences at the university.