The list of grantees supported by 2017 National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars was announced in August 2017. Among 200 grantees, three alumni of Kuang Yaming Honors School were on the list; they are Liang Gaolin (Grade 1989), Dai Junbiao (Grade 1993), and Wu Xuefeng (Grade 1996).
These grantees are top-notch scholars that attract great attention. The National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars supports young scholars who have achieved outstanding results in basic science research to choose their independent research directions and develop innovative research in order to promote the growth of young scientific and technological personnel, attract oversea talents, and cultivate a group of distinguished academic leaders who can enter the front edge of science and technology in the world.
The number of undergraduate alumni supported by the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars, to some extent, reflects the quality of talent cultivation in a university. In recent years, many KYM alumni have been granted this national science fund. KYM School is committed to exploring new modes of teaching and cultivating innovative personnel in such aspects as curriculum innovation in undergraduate general education, students’ science and technology innovation, cooperation in talent cultivation at home and abroad, and undergraduate ideological and political education so that innovative, high-quality and top talented students could stand out and make achievements.
Liang Gaolin’s Bio:
Liang Gaolin, male, was born at Xinghua in Jiangsu province. He serves as a professor and doctoral supervisor at the Department of Chemistry, University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). He was admitted as a top student in science to Nanjing University’s Department for Intensive Instruction (now Kuang Yaming Honors School). He obtained his bachelor’s in physics and chemistry from Nanjing University in 1993, obtained his master’s in chemical technology from Zhengzhou University in 2002, and doctorate in medicinal chemistry from Fudan University in 2005. From 1993 to 2002, he was engaged in research on osteoporosis medicine through radioligand binding assay at the State Key Laboratory of Nuclear Medicine of Jiangsu Institute of Nuclear Medicine (a National Key Science and Technology Project in the Nineth Five-Year Plan). He has followed his supervisor Xu Bing to study for his post-doc in chemistry at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology from September 2005 to January 2008. His research focused on supramolecular hydrogel, the preparation of inorganic nanoparticles, and the application in biomedicine. From January 2008 to May 2010, he followed his supervisor Rao Jianghong to study for his post-doc at Stanford University’s School of Medicine, focusing on molecule and cell imaging. During his work at Stanford, he independently discovered and developed a novel biocompatible condensation reaction technology platform for the synthesis of nanoparticles in living cells. The technology platform can be widely applied to the synthesis of nanometer materials in vitro, the activity detection of important enzymes in living organisms, and early diagnosis and treatment of tumors. The paper on his research was published on Nature Chemistry. In January 2010, he was appointed a professor and doctoral supervisor of Department of Chemistry, USTC. His current research focuses on the synthesis and preparation of nanomaterials for early diagnosis and treatment of severe diseases. So far, he has published over 80 papers on SCI. More than 60 of his papers have been published on Nat Chem, Acc Chem Res, Angew Chem Int Ed, J Am Chem Soc, Nano Lett, ACS Nano, Chem Sci, Biomaterials, Small, Anal Chem, Nanoscale, and Chem Commun, with an H-index of 21. His papers have been cited more than 2,600 times. He has obtained one National Second-Class New Drug Certificate, five national patents, one world patent, one American patent, the third prize of the Science and Technology Progress Award in Jiangsu province. He was supported by the Program for New Century Excellent University Talents by the Ministry of Education in 2010 and was granted the Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars in Anhui province in 2011. He also received the Excellent Young Teacher Award by USTC in 2011 and was selected into Anhui Provincial Hundred Talents Program in 2012.
Wu Xuefeng’s Bio:
Wu Xuefeng graduated from Department for Intensive Instruction (now Kuang Yaming Honors School), Nanjing University, in 2000 and obtained his doctorate in astrophysics from the Department of Astronomy at Nanjing University in 2005. He has worked as a post-doc researcher Purple Mountain Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences, as a visiting scholar at California Institute of Technology, and then as a post-doc researcher at Pennsylvania State University and University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His research is on such front edge fields as high-energy astrophysics, time domain astronomy, cosmology, and high-precision astronomical testing of the basic hypotheses of special relativity. So far, he has published over 110 SCI papers on Nature, Science, PRL, and other leading international astronomical journals, with more than 4,800 citations and an H index of 32. He now serves as chief researcher and doctoral supervisor of High Energy Time Domain Astronomical Group at Purple Mountain Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and deputy dean of School of Astronomy and Space Science at University of Science and Technology of China. He won One Hundred National Excellent Doctoral Dissertations in 2007 and Outstanding Paper Award for Young Scholars from Committee for Space Research in 2008. His research result was selected into 2009 Top10 Astronomical Science and Technology Advances in China (as the first author), and he was selected as the first member of Youth Innovation Promotion Association of Chinese Academy of Sciences (excellent member) in 2011. He was supported by the Hundred Talents Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (excellent in final assessment) in 2012 and was supported by the Excellent Young Scientists Fund from the National Natural Science Foundation of China in 2013. He received the Zhu Liyuehua Outstanding Teacher Award and the Outstanding Graduate Advisor Award of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2016. He was selected into the third level training talents of the Fifth 333 High-Level Talent Training Project of Jiangsu Province (young and middle-aged academic and technological leader). He was supported by the Outstanding Young Scientists Fund from the National Natural Science Foundation of China in 2017. Now he is one of the Chinese leaders of Sino-Australian Antarctic astronomy cooperation, and as a member of the scientific team, he has participated in the key astronomical projects that have been set up in China, including Hard X-ray Modulation Telescope (HXMT, launched in 2017), POLAR (launched in 2016), SVOM (will be launched in 2022), Einstein Probe (will be launched in 2022), and Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO, will be put into use in 2021). He also participated in key astronomical programs that China is pushing forward, including China Antarctic Kunlun Station Observatory (listed in the Major Scientific and Technological Infrastructure Plan of the12th Five-Year Plan in China), 12-Meter Optical Infrared Telescope (LOT, listed in the Major Scientific and Technological Infrastructure Plan of the13th Five-Year Plan), X-ray Timing and Polarization (XTP), High Energy Radiation Detector (HERD). Besides, he also participated in international key astronomical projects such as Thirty-Meter Telescope (TMT), and XIPE.
Wu Xuefeng’s Bio:
Dai Junbiao is a research fellow at Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He graduated from Department for Intensive Instruction, Nanjing University, in 1997. He received his master’s in biotechnology and science from Tsinghua University in 2000 and obtained his doctorate in Iowa State University in 2006. He has engaged in postdoctoral research at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Medicine from 2006 to 2011 and has served as a research fellow at School of Life Sciences, Tsinghua University, from 2011 to 2017.
Dai at his laboratory studies epigenetics and synthetic biology and developed gene synthesis, gene assembly, and technologies for genome-wide design and synthesis. He is also a leading member of International Synthetic Yeast Genome Project. He has published more than 40 papers on such journals as Cell, Nature, Science, Molecular Cell, PNAS, and Nucleic Acid Res and has applied for or been authorized for eight patents. Among them, his paper published on Cell in 2008 was selected as the cover paper. He and his collaborative team, Sc2.0, published five cover papers and monographs about chromosome synthesis on Science in March 2017 and were selected as one of 2017 Top10 Scientific Advances in China. In 2011, he received Albert Lehninger Research Award from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Medicine. In the same year, he was selected into the first batch of the youths of the CPC’s Organization Department. He was awarded the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars in 2017.
