At the “Run for Fun” running race held at Fudan last weekend, Cosimo Bambi, Xie Xide Junior Professor at Department of Physics, became the champion of Men’s 10K (for faculty staff) race. Since 2014 when he participated in the race for the first time, the Italian relativist and cosmologist has won the championships for many times.
The temperature in Shanghai plummeted recently, but Bambi keeps running almost every day, “I think the weather in Shanghai is good. When I was in Germany and the United States, I also ran when it was -20 degrees Celcius.”
A few days ago, Bambi was also honored with Shanghai’s Magnolia Gold Award. “It is an honor for me to take this prestigious award. And I have to admit it is not only because of my merits, but also because of the support of our department, my students, postdocs and research assistant.”
In 2012, Bambi joined Fudan University. “I was in the University of Tokyo. I had several Chinese colleagues, and I knew from them that China was significantly investing in educational research, and it was a place with many opportunities, especially for young people.”
With research interest in fields ranging from strong field tests of general relativity to black holes and X-ray astronomy, Bambi has more than 150 publications and is highly cited. “The research environment (of Fudan) is very nice. It’s suitable for research.”
In the past ten years, Bambi has established Fudan’s first team dedicated to the research of high-energy astrophysics and black holes, which includes not only Chinese students but also international students and postdoctoral researchers from other countries.
“He is very kind, patient, passionate, and fully focused on both classes and research,” said Shafqat Riaz, a postdoctoral researcher on Bambi’s team, whose research field is to test general relativity using X-ray reflection spectra of accreting black holes. As a supervisor, Bambi said he doesn’t like pushing the students or setting the deadline. “I think the students should become independent and self-motivated.”
With Bambi’s efforts, the team has launched cooperation with peers from world-renowned universities, such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology, California Institute of Technology and the University of Cambridge.
To help China cultivate talents and improve the quality of education and research in astrophysics, Bambi has managed to publish two textbooks, one on particle cosmology and the other general relativity, in Chinese.
“Previous textbooks lack the necessary presentation of calculation details. This book [Bambi’s Introduction to General Relativity] can help students learn this course more easily,” said Menglei Zhou, a PhD student working on high energy astrophysics at the University of Tübingen, Germany. In 2018, as a Fudan postgraduate student supervised by Bambi, Zhou translated the book Introduction to General Relativity into Chinese.
As a researcher, Bambi has a clear idea of the roadmap of his research, and he’s always open to consider new lines of research. “For the moment, there are not many research groups working on astrophysics in China, but in the next 5-10 years, we can expect more professors of this field in China.”
Presented by Fudan University Media Center
