Liang Dai, a 2021 recipient of the prestigious Sloan Research Fellowship, has joined Fudan University as a full professor in the Department of Physics and the Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics. This marks the latest addition to Fudan's growing roster of elite scientists.
Dai, 38, was previously an assistant professor in the Department of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley. He earned his bachelor's degree in physics from Peking University in 2011 and his Ph.D. in physics from Johns Hopkins University in 2015, focusing on theoretical cosmology. After his doctorate, he held prestigious postdoctoral positions, including the NASA Einstein Fellowship and the John Bahcall Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study.
His research spans a wide range of topics in cosmology and astrophysics, including the large-scale structure and evolution of the universe, dark matter and its gravitational lensing signatures, and astrophysical gravitational waves.
Dai's move to Fudan was foreshadowed by his involvement in a joint Fudan-Nanjing University course titled "Ask the Sky: Modern Astrophysics Frontiers and Practice" in 2026, where he was listed as a professor at Fudan. He had also visited Fudan as a visiting scholar in July 2024.
Fudan University has been on a hiring spree in recent years. Notable recruits include Hao Su (former tenured associate professor at UC San Diego and now Distinguished Professor at Fudan), Feng Yuan (former deputy director of Shanghai Astronomical Observatory and now Director of Fudan's Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics), Suoqing Ji (former young researcher at Shanghai Astronomical Observatory), Dejing Dou (former partner at BCG and chief data scientist at Baidu Research), and Craig Anderson (President-elect of the World Stroke Organization).
The Sloan Research Fellowship, awarded annually to early-career scientists, is one of the oldest such awards in the United States and has a track record of producing Nobel and Fields Medal winners. Dai was one of 126 recipients in 2021, receiving $75,000 in flexible research funding.