Each year, the grand prize of Fudan Academic Star recognizes the most outstanding graduate student research in Fudan university.
Since 2010, Fudan University Graduate Student Union has been holding an annual competition to honor graduate students who have made distinctive and commendable achievements in their research area with the title of “Academic Star”.
Fudan Academic Star competition, for its high academic standards, aims to motivate graduate students at Fudan University to continuously devote themselves to their research interests and overcome difficulties when conducting research now and in the future.
This year, the competition announced 31 Academic Stars from three discipline areas of humanities, science and medicine.
But only 10 of the 31 were shortlisted for the final grand prize.
They are :
(first line, from left to right)
Huang Zhenqian, School of International Relations and Public Affairs
Li Chaoyang, Institutes of Brain Science
Li Ting, School of Management
Deng Yujun, Department of Physics
Liu Cong, School of Public Health
(second line, from left to right)
Xu Caisu, School of Journalism
Gu Yuyang, Department of Chemistry
Mo Fangjie, Institute of Modern Physics
Zhao Tiancong, Laboratory of Advanced Materials
Huo Xiangru, School of Basic Medicine
At a subsequent presentation session, these candidates briefed the judges their research and work experience. This year, the presentation session invited Academician and Vice President of Fudan University Zhang Renhe to act as the main judge.
The following five students were the final winners of the grand prize:
Huang Zhenqian from the School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Li Ting from the School of management, Deng Yujun from the Department of Physics, Liu Cong from the School of Public Health, and Li Zhaoyang from the Institute of Brain Science. Congratulations to them.
The video of the presentation session held on May 26 is available at https://www.bilibili.com/video/av883321489/.
Let’s meet the 5 grand prize winners and hear what they say about their research efforts.
Deng Yujun, Department of Physics
“Under the guidance of Professor Zhang Yuanbo, I was engaged in three major projects. We adopted the aluminum-oxidecleavage technique to obtain a larger area of two-dimensional materials from more types of layered substances compared to the “Scotch-tape” method; the gate-tunable room-temperature ferromagnetism in two-dimensional Fe3GeTe2 we found can be applied to spintronic devices in the future; and we also observed Quantum anomalous Hall effect in intrinsic magnetic topological insulator MnBi2Te4, which means the resistance of this two-dimensional material is determined only by the cosmological constant. The latter two findings were published respectively in Nature and Science.”
Li Ting, School of Management
“The most important lesson I’ve learned from conducting research is to carry on and never give up. I spent the first year of my doctoral study, which was torturous but rewarding, on a paper later titled ‘Inference for generalized partial functional linear regression’ and accepted by Statistica Sinica, one of the world’s most prominent journals in statistics. During my year abroad as an exchange student at the University of Texas MD Andersons Cancer Center, I juggled between literature reading, statistical modeling, theoretical analysis and data processing for an interdisciplinary study on Alzheimer's disease. It was very challenging, but when I look back, it was all worth it.”
Liu Cong, School of Public Health
“I spent three years with my PhD adviser and my fellow researchers collecting air quality data from 650 cities in 24 countries on 6 continents. We found the exposure of residents to particulate matters is closely linked to mortality rates, even when concentrations of PM10 and PM2.5 are regulated according to the World Health Organization’s standards on air quality in major countries. This has enormous implications on global public health governance.”
Huang Zhenqian, School of International Relations and Public Affairs
“Africa needs help from the international community and I want my research to reflect humanistic care. My dissertation is the first paper in China that has made a systematic analysis on land reform and national development in Africa. I was curious about the reasons why some African countries had implemented land reform successfully but other didn’t. I gathered detailed information on the 103 land reforms that have ever taken place in Africa and established a theory that explains this result through the capacity of countries.”
Li Chaoyang, Institutes of Brain Science
“We found 4 small-molecule compounds which are able to interact with the disease-causing protein. This finding makes it possible to treat Huntington's Disease through oral drug delivery or injection. More importantly, our research highlighted the possibility of developing a new type of drug which is autophagosome-tethering compounds. Our findings were published in Nature, titled ‘Allele-selective lowering of mutant HTT protein by HTT-LC3 linker compounds’, and was listed as one of the ten remarkable papers from 2019 by the journal.”
Editor: Deng Jianguo
