The Astronomy Postdoc Science Day was held at KIAA on 2016 December 12 to celebrate the excellence of KIAA postdocs. The day featured presentations from13 postdocs, with scientific highlights that include investigations into gamma ray bursts and supernova, active galactic nuclei, galactic structures, and star formation.
The Science Day celebrated the KIAA postdocs as the top-ranked postdocs of any department at Peking University. Our postdocs published 12 papers as first author to date in 2016, with many of these results becoming highly cited and have been presented at domestic and international conferences. The awards and grant funding obtained by our postdocs is a recognition of their excellence in publication. Two KIAA postdocs, Shu Wang and Yuanpei Yang, were among the six PKU postdocs in all disciplines to win a prestigious award from the Innovative Postdoc Support Program, sponsored by the national China Postdoc Committee, which provides a total of 600,000 RMB over two years. Two postdocs, Kohei Hayashi and Yao Su, also won a PKU Boya Postdoctoral Fellowship, while another, Jessy Jose, won a PKU Outstanding Postdoctor Award. Of 15 total postdocs, 8 won grant funding from either the General or Special Fund from the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation, the highest fraction of any department at PKU and much higher than the 10-30% of other departments in the sciences. The KIAA has received more outstanding postdoc awards from PKU and the national government and has the highest rate of postdocs with successful national proposals of any department at PKU, all through a highly competitive proposal process.
The scientific output from our postdocs highlights KIAA's contributions in PKU, within China, and internationally. This output is possible because of the strong support from both PKU and the national government and from the Kavli Foundation, which when combined allows KIAA to recruit talented postdocs from domestic and international universities.
