Academician Tsu-Lin Mei passed away in the United States on October 14, 2023. He was 90 years old.

Dr. Mei was an internationally renowned linguist, specializing in Chinese grammar history and Chinese phonology history. He earned his Ph.D. from the Department of Philosophy at Yale University in 1962 and taught at Harvard University from 1964 to 1971. From 1971 until his retirement in 2000, he served as the Chairman and the Hu Shih Professor Emeritus in the Department of Asian Studies at Cornell University. He also served at Academia Sinica, as Adjunct Research Fellow and then as Correspondence Research Fellow at the Institute of History and Philology, and later as Correspondence Research Fellow at the Institute of Linguistics.

Dr. Mei made significant contributions to the study of modern grammar, dialect grammar, and Old Chinese morphology. He traced the historical development of Chinese grammar, discussed the ancient tonal evolutions, applied linguistic methods and phonological knowledge to literary criticism, and proposed new theories regarding the phonetics in Recent Style poetry, drawing inspiration from Sanskrit.

Dr. Mei served as the President of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics (1994-1995) and was an honorary member of the Association of Chinese Phonology, Republic of China. He also held visiting professor positions at various prestigious universities. Dr. Mei was elected Academia Sinica Academician in 1994.