Dai, who received a Sloan Research Fellowship in physics in 2021 while teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, recently became a professor at Fudan University and joined its Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics, the South China Morning Post reported.

Established in 1955 by former General Motors chief executive Alfred P. Sloan, the Sloan Research Fellowship recognizes outstanding early-career researchers across eight scientific fields. According to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, 60 recipients have later won Nobel Prizes, while 17 have gone on to receive the Fields Medal, widely regarded as mathematics' highest honor.

Chinese astrophysicist Dai Liang. Photo courtesy of UC Berkeley

At Fudan, Dai, 38, will also help teach a joint program with Nanjing University that will allow 15 undergraduate students from both schools to visit leading Chinese astronomy facilities, including the Purple Mountain Observatory in Nanjing, the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, and the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope, the world's largest and most sensitive filled-aperture radio telescope, in Guizhou.

The program is open to students beyond astrophysics majors and will include a course taught by Dai on the origins and evolution of the universe.

Born in Hangzhou, Dai earned a bachelor's degree in physics from Peking University in 2011 before completing a doctorate in theoretical cosmology at Johns Hopkins University in 2015. He then conducted postdoctoral research at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he held a NASA Einstein Fellowship from 2015 to 2018 and later a John Bahcall postdoctoral fellowship until 2020, according to his UC Berkeley profile. Nobel Prize-winning physicists Chen-Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee were affiliated with the institute when they received the award in 1957.

Dai joined UC Berkeley as an assistant professor in 2020 and was named one of the university's five Sloan Research Fellows the following year. His research focuses on gravitational lensing, a phenomenon in which massive objects such as black holes bend light, allowing scientists to detect objects that cannot be observed directly.

By analyzing these distortions, Dai has helped identify pairs of black holes hidden within the Milky Way and contributed to research on the distribution of dark matter and the rate at which the universe is expanding.