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36 CAS/In Focus Wu Fuyuan Yuan Yaxiang Yang Xueming “For CAS institutes and universities, returnees like Yang represent a young, energetic talent pool with strong credentials.” Zhou Zhonghe Editorial News Report: Attracting Top Talent A key factor in the revitalization of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) research under the Knowledge Innovation Program, or KIP was the push to recruit internationally competitive talent to CAS institutes (see page 43). “There are a few factors that are very important in doing science; the most important is the talent,” says Yang Xueming, director of the State Key Laboratory of Molecular Reaction Dynamics at the Dalian Institute of Physics. Yang himself earned his Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Barbara and worked at institutions in the United States and Taiwan before returning to the mainland in 2001. There he designs and builds instruments to investigate chemical reactions, particularly those that occur on the surfaces of materials or in the gas phase. For CAS institutes and universities, returnees like Yang (known as haigui, or sea turtles) represent a young, energetic talent pool with strong credentials. With their foreign language skills and international networks, they have been a major driver in opening up China’s research by publishing in international journals and forging collaborations with colleagues overseas. “We are trying to create an international atmosphere for doing research” and ensure that China’s researchers are internationally competitive, says Lü Yonglong, director-general of the Bureau of International Cooperation at CAS. The emphasis on recruitment is also an effort to make up for lost time. Higher education and most research activities stopped Zhou Qi Talent and Education for a decade during the Cultural Revolution, and in the '80s and '90s, the overwhelming majority of China’s top graduates in science went abroad, never to return. As Zhou Zhonghe, director of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) in Beijing, says, “Why would they come back? The salaries were miserable.” Recruitment Programs CAS’s ability to attract young, foreign-trained scientists comes in part from special talent-recruitment programs aimed at this cohort. One of the earliest of these, the Hundred Talents Program, started in 1994 with the aim of recruiting hundreds of outstanding new hires domestically and abroad by the end of the century. Applicants who passed the competitive selection process received generous startup funding for their laboratories and other benefits. The program continues today; it now provides eligible new hires with nearly half a million U.S. dollars in startup funds for their first three years of research. More than 2,000 researchers have benefited from the program so far, most of whom have overseas experience. One of them, Wu Fuyuan, spent a year as a visiting scholar at the University of Rennes 1 in France, and later left a faculty position in Shandong Province’s Jining University in 2003 to join CAS’s Institute of Geology and Geophysics. “At that time it wasn’t easy for the younger generation to get research grants,” he recalls. “The Hundred Talents Program provided 2 million yuan [about US$240,000 at the time], so that was a big grant for a young scientist.” Wu is now the deputy director of his institute, and last year won the TWAS Prize for Earth Sciences. In hindsight, “I think my choice was the right one,” Wu says, citing the institute’s good facilities, access to funding opportunities, and freedom from teaching duties. And joining CAS has afforded him unique research opportunities, he says. “In universities, research is organized by individual professors, but the Academy really focuses on important problems in science or in the development of the country,” organizing teams around high-priority research projects, he says. Wu is part of a large collaboration that since 2006 has studied the North China Craton, a large section of the earth’s crust that spans parts of China, Mongolia, and Korea. A more recent Hundred Talents recipient, Liu Lingli, earned a Ph.D. at North Carolina State University and did a postdoc with the US Environmental Protection Agency before taking a faculty position at the Institute of Botany (IB-CAS) late last year. The startup package she received through CREDIT: PHOTOS BY RICKY WONG
CREDIT: PHOTOS BY RICKY WONG the Hundred Talents Program compared favorably with those offered at U.S. institutions, but she admits, “To be honest, I was very nervous when I decided to come back to China. The working pressure, the expensive living cost in Beijing and many other things made me hesitate.” She is already convinced her choice was the right one, however, given IB-CAS’s high-quality facilities, the support she has received to build up her lab, the “transparent and fair” performance appraisal system, and the opportunities to work with talented colleagues at IB-CAS and around the world. The institute has even provided her with free temporary housing to use for up to five years while she looks for a permanent home. Less than half a year after coming to IB-CAS Liu already had graduate students and a research assistant studying the impact of climate change and air pollution on ecological processes, work she hopes can be applied to policy development. The success of the Hundred Talents Program has spawned other talent recruitment initiatives, both at CAS and other Chinese institutions, such as the Ministry of Science and Technology. “We probably took the leadership role in recruiting talented people from overseas, and other ministries learned from this,” says Lü. CAS itself now has an array of programs to attract talent from abroad at various stages of their careers. The Fellowships for Young International Scientists targets postdocs, for example, while the Visiting Professorships for Senior International Scientists support those already on the tenure track. One highly competitive program, the Einstein Professorship, brings distinguished international experts to China for one to two weeks, where they visit CAS institutes and deliver a lecture at one of the CAS universities. After returning home, the professors are encouraged to keep in touch with their Chinese colleagues, and often host those colleagues or their students for short stints in their own labs. This last program is a good way to provide mentorship and feedback to young researchers who may have few senior colleagues at their own institutes, says Poo Mu-ming, the director of the Institute for Neuroscience. The CAS Advantage While talent recruitment programs may play a role in a scientist’s decision to join CAS, most say that their institutes, and China itself, were the primary draws. Zhou Qi, for example, worked at CAS’s Institute of Developmental Biology, then at INRA in Paris. Despite his love of European culture, he joined the Institute of Zoology in 2003 under the Hundred Talents Program. “I think it’s my duty, because I’m a Chinese scientist,” he says of his decision to return. “CAS is my family. I really want to contribute.” Zhou has contributed by starting China’s first center for stem cell research and regenerative medicine within the institute, and by doing groundbreaking work on how mature cells can be reprogrammed to become stem cells or different cell types. Like Zhou, Pan Jianwei was drawn back to China by the opportunity to make a difference. He had earned his Ph.D. at the University of Vienna and was doing a postdoc there when he was offered a unique opportunity at his alma mater, the University of Science and Technology of China. “I decided to build a world-class quantum optics laboratory in China, mainly because China, our motherland, is changing rapidly, and it is our responsibility to be part of this great period rather than being bystanders,” he says. He joined the university in 2001, and in 2002 started its new Division of Quantum Physics and Quantum Information. As the division’s director, Pan oversees research aimed at developing communications and computing applications for quantum principles. His group has so far published many results in high-profile journals, including an observation of an eight-photon quantum entanglement, and last year Pan, now 42, became the youngest member of CAS (see page 39). Similarly, Xi Nanhua, a professor at the Institute of Mathematics in Beijing who has spent years studying and teaching abroad, most recently at the University of California, Riverside, says that cultural familiarity and a sense of duty keep him coming back to China. “China still doesn’t have enough good scientists, so as a well-educated scientist I should stay here to do more work for the country,” he says. For him, an important part of that work is training the next generation. “I like to train young students, to get more people working in this area,” he says. In addition to his work with students in his own research group, he has helped devise courses for graduate students in the institute. But patriotism and recruiting programs aren’t the only factors bringing scientists back to China; the improved research conditions at many CAS institutes also play a role. The IVPP’s Zhou has seen the change first-hand, having worked at the institute as an associate research fellow in the early 1990s. After his first few years there, he went to the University of Kansas to earn his Ph.D., an experience he credits with giving him a better understanding of concepts such as population biology and evolution. He returned to IVPP in 1999. “Before I came back there were very few people of my age in the institute,” he recalls. He was the first scientist to return to IVPP after a stint abroad, but he was soon joined by others. “Since I came back I think the younger generation, in their 30s, have gradually become the major force in the research here,” he says. He himself has published extensively on early birds, feathered dinosaurs and pterosaurs, and interactions between different types of vertebrates, and is both a member of CAS and a foreign associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Nearby, at the Institute of Computational Mathematics and Scientific/Engineering Computing, Professor Yuan Yaxiang tells a similar story. He first came to the institute in 1981 as a graduate student and later became a professor there, but also spent time doing research in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Germany. “When I was a student here in 1982, most of professors were very old, and the institute was Jiang Lei Xi Nanhua Laboratory at the Institute of Zoology Institute of Zoology Editorial News Report 37
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