Citing reasons including a lack of adequate research funding and shrinking opportunities for Chinese academics to lead major projects in Western countries, about a dozen scientists and specialists have left the United States and Britain this year to build their careers in China. The stories of 10 of them that drew wide reader response are set out below:
- Zhang Kai (Yale University): Zhang Kai, who is building an ultra-large cellular-structure group data bank with unprecedented precision, chose to return to his homeland, China, as the natural choice for realizing that vast ambition.
- Chen Peipei (energy scientist): For some emerging young scientists, the former prestige of British academia is now fading, amid steadily shrinking research funding and a complex geopolitical situation, driving top talent to look elsewhere for stability and resources. Energy scientist Chen Peipei left Cambridge in such circumstances to set up her own lab in Hong Kong.
- Omar Yaghi (Nobel laureate): Omar Yaghi, who won last year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry, has joined China’s Tsinghua University to lead a new, artificial-intelligence-driven research center after leaving the United States.
- Dai Liang (black-hole researcher): Physicist Dai Liang had won a prestigious fellowship reserved for the “most brilliant young scientists” of the United States and Canada for his work searching for black holes. He recently returned to China and joined a position in Shanghai.
- Jiang Jianfeng (chip scientist): It usually takes an academic eight to ten years after completing a PhD to become a doctoral supervisor, but semiconductor scientist Jiang Jianfeng achieved that distinction in just 18 months, and has left MIT to join Peking University in China.
- Chih-Ying Su (neurobiologist and former taekwondo captain): Chih-Ying Su, a neurobiologist specially known and praised for research on the sense of smell in fruit flies and mosquitoes, left the post of faculty vice-chair at the University of California, San Diego, to join the Shenzhen Academy of Medical Sciences.
- Ling Haibin (AI scientist): Ling Haibin, the acclaimed computer scientist behind the world’s first mobile plant-identification app, quit his job in the United States and joined Westlake University in Hangzhou, eastern China, as a full-time professor.
- Liang Zhi (computer-vision scientist): Two decades ago, while at Microsoft, Liang Zhi developed technologies that were built into products such as the Windows Media Video player and Blu-ray discs used by millions of people worldwide. That computer-vision scientist has now returned to China from North America.
- Award-winning memory-chip expert: A renowned expert in semiconductor packaging and memory chips left a professorship at the University of California, Irvine, after more than two decades, and joined a leading conductive-materials company in eastern China.
- Zhu Ziqiang (EV motor expert): Zhu Ziqiang, one of the world’s foremost experts in electric-motor engineering, has ended a career in Britain spanning nearly four decades (38 years) and moved to the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) to take up a full-time post.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report