The Board of Trustees of the International Space Science Institute in Beijing (ISSI-BJ) has elected Professor Maurizio Falanga from Switzerland to head the Institute as its Executive Director. ISSI-BJ is an Advanced Study Institute that invites space scientists from all over the world to contribute to the achievement of a deeper scientific and technological understanding of future space missions as well as of the scientific results from current and past missions through multidisciplinary research.Professor Maurizio Falanga was born in Basel, Switzerland and graduated in Theoretical Physics at the University of Basel. He received his Ph.D. degree in Astrophysics at the University of Rome “La Sapienza”, Italy. After his Ph.D. he held various research fellowship positions in high-energy astrophysics departments in Paris, France. Falanga worked on accretion and emission physics in neutron stars, white dwarfs, and black holes for more than 15 years as a scientist and teacher. He published over 100 papers in his research fields, and has been invited to serve on a number of high-level international committees.During the last four years he has been involved in space science administration as the science programme manager at ISSI in Bern, Switzerland. ISSI-BJ was inaugurated as a new institute on July 16, 2013 and is a close cooperative partner of ISSI in Bern. Maurizio Falanga will be the first Executive Director of ISSI-BJ and will share his time between Bern and Beijing.He will lead ISSI-BJ in its formation and in promoting space sciences research by worldwide collaborations using similar tools to those used by ISSI in Bern.