Peking University, Feb. 27, 2019: On February 19, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announced the 126 recipients of the 2019 Sloan Research Fellowships, among which nine scholars with PKU background were named for their outstanding research promise, especially in the field of chemistry.
The fellowships, awarded annually since 1955, honor early-career scholars whose achievements mark them as among the most promising researchers in eight scientific and technical fields – chemistry, computational and evolutionary molecular biology, computer science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience, ocean sciences, and physics. On the 2019 list of awardees, alumni from Peking University, nine in total, far outnumber those from other Chinese universities or colleges. Among these nine fellows who received education at PKU in the past, five of them has made substantial contributions to the field of chemistry, which indicates the pioneering position of PKU in some cutting-edge research areas.
Peking University has fully showcased its teaching excellence and research strength on account of the 2019 Sloan Research Fellows List. The full list of the 2019 Fellows is available at the Sloan Foundation website (click here).
The nine awardees who graduated from Peking University are as follows:
Feng Xiaofeng
Dr. Feng received his Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Physics from Peking University in 2007 and he spent two years and a half as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University before joining UCF as an assistant professor in August 2016.
Lin Song
Dr. Lin received his B.S. from Peking University, Ph.D. from Harvard University. His research in the Lin Lab lies in the broadly defined area of organic chemistry with specific interests in electrosynthesis, asymmetric catalysis, and organic materials.
Wang Hailiang
Dr. Wang received his B.S. from Peking University in 2007 and his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2012. Research in Wang’s group employs chemistry, materials science, nanotechnology and surface science to tackle the challenges in electrochemical energy storage and conversion.
Xia Yan
Dr. Xia studied chemistry at Peking University (B.S. 2002) and McMaster University (M.S. 2005), before his doctoral research on the synthesis and study of cyclic and bottlebrush polymers at California Institute of Technology (Ph.D. 2010). He joined the chemistry faculty at Stanford in the summer of 2013 to continue his longstanding interest in developing organic materials by intimately integrating synthetic chemistry with materials science.
Wang Botong
Dr. Wang received his B.S from Peking University in 2006 and his Ph.D. from Purdue University in 2012. From 2012 to 2015, he also worked as a visiting assistant professor at the University of Notre Dame. In the following year, he worked in the University of Wisconsin. From 2017, he has been serving as an Assistant Professor, in University of Wisconsin – Madison. He is especially interested in the topology of algebraic varieties, and its interaction with combinatorics and algebraic statistics.
You Mingxu
Dr. You obtained his bachelor’s degree from Peking University in 2008 and a doctoral degree from the University of Florida in 2012. He is currently an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His primary research areas include DNA/RNA nanotechnology, bioimaging, biosensing, synthetic biology.
Cai Yang
Dr. Cai is an assistant professor of Computer Science and Economics (secondary appointment) at Yale University. He received his B.Sc. from Peking University in 2008 and a doctoral degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2013. His research interests include theory of computation, economics and computation, online algorithms, etc.
Cheng Xiuyuan
Dr. Cheng is an assistant professor of Mathematics at Duke University. He received his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Peking University in 2009 and a doctoral degree from Princeton University in 2013. As an applied analyst, he is keen to develop theoretical and computational techniques to solve problems in high-dimensional statistics, signal processing and machine learning
Zhou Xin
Dr. Zhou is an assistant professor of Mathematics at the University of California Santa Barbara. He obtained his master’s degree in Mathematics from Peking University in 2008 and a doctoral degree from Stanford University in 2013. His research interests mainly lie in geometric analysis, calculus of variations and general relativity.
Written by: Wang Nini
Edited by: Huang Weijian
