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Shi Huang

A physicist who was awarded a fellowship reserved for the “brightest young scientists” in the US and Canada for his work hunting for black holes has returned to China.
Dai Liang, who received a Sloan Research Fellowship for physics in 2021, recently took up a professorship at Fudan University in Shanghai and joined the Fudan Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics.
The fellowships were established in 1955 by former General Motors chief executive Alfred Sloan to support early-career researchers across eight fields.
Sixty fellows have gone on to win Nobel Prizes, with 17 winning Fields Medals for mathematics, according to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Dai, who was born in Hangzhou in eastern China in 1988, specialises in cosmology and astrophysics.
He first studied at Peking University before moving to Johns Hopkins University in the United States where he received a PhD in theoretical cosmology.
He then moved on to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton for postdoctoral research, where he took up a Nasa Einstein Fellowship and later a John Bahcall postdoctoral fellowship.
Nobel laureates Chen-ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee were professors at the institute when they won the award in 1957.
“I have a wide range of research interests in astrophysics and physical cosmology,” Dai wrote on his personal website.
In 2020, he joined University of California, Berkeley as an assistant professor, and the following year he was one of five academics from the university to receive a Sloan fellowship.
Dai has been asked for comment.


His research focuses on a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing, which happens when objects such as black holes distort light or gravitational waves, acting in effect as a cosmic magnifying glass.
By their very nature, black holes can only be detected because of the effect they generate, and Dai’s focus has been identifying potential twin black holes within the Milky Way.
Dai calculated the ways the gravitational lensing effect would distort the path of light waves and then used that as the basis to develop programs to filter vast amounts of astronomical data to identify potential binary black holes.
After finding the binary black holes, he was then able to make inferences about the distribution of invisible dark matter in the universe and the Hubble constant, which is used to measure the speed at which the universe is expanding.
Dai will also be involved in a course run by Fudan and Nanjing universities, which will offer 15 undergraduates from both universities the opportunity to visit the Purple Mountain Observatory in Nanjing, the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory and the China Sky Eye FAST observation base in Guizhou.
The course is not just confined to astrophysics majors and will include a class from Dai on the origins and evolution of the universe.
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The physicist who received a fellowship reserved for the ‘brightest young scientists’ in North America has joined Fudan University


The physicist who received a fellowship reserved for the ‘brightest young scientists’ in North America has joined Fudan University.


United States

Shanghai

Johns Hopkins University

Chinese black hole-hunting scientist Dai Liang quits US for Shanghai post

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The physicist who received a fellowship reserved for the ‘brightest young scientists’ in North America has joined Fudan University

The physicist who received a fellowship reserved for the ‘brightest young scientists’ in North America has joined Fudan University