On 8 July 2022, the Research Grant Council (RGC) announced the application results of the RGC Senior Research Fellow Scheme (SRFS) 2022/23. This year, RGC received a total of 32 nominations for SRFS and selected 10 nominees for awards in 2022/23. Professor Sun Defeng, Chair Professor and Head of the Department of Applied Mathematics, is selected as one of the 10 SRFS awardees after a rigorous assessment process. Prof. Sun will be conferred the title "RGC Senior Research Fellow" and receiving a fellowship grant from RGC for five years to support his research project titled ‘Nonlinear conic programming: Theory, algorithms and software’.
Joined PolyU in 2017, Professor Sun is Chair Professor of Applied Optimization and Operations Research and assumed Headship of the Department of Applied Mathematics in 2019. He received his bachelor’s and Master’s degree from Nanjing University in 1989 and 1992 respectively, and PhD from Institute of Applied Mathematics from Chinese Academy of Science in 1995 and worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the University of New South Wales, Australia. Before joining PolyU, Professor Sun served as Professor at Department of Mathematics, National University of Singapore, Deputy Director (Research) at the NUS Risk Management Institute and Program Director for its Master of Financial Engineering program.
Professor Sun was ranked among the world’s top 2% most-cited scientists by Stanford University in 2021, and conferred as the Inaugural Fellows of the China Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (CSIAM) and Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) respectively in 2020. In 2018, Professor Sun and his collaborators Professor Kim-Chuan Toh and Dr. Liuqin Yang, was the first Asian team awarded with the prestigious prize in computational optimization Beale--Orchard-Hays Prize for Excellence in Computational Mathematical Programming for their outstanding work on SDPNAL+, which describes a new method for semidefinite programming with nonnegative constraints.
RGC Senior Research Fellow Scheme
To build up a pool of local research talent to sustain Hong Kong’s competitiveness and propel the development of our higher education sector, the Research Grants Council (RGC) introduced three new regular fellowship schemes in 2019/20 academic year, namely RGC Postdoctoral Fellowship Scheme (PDFS), RGC Research Fellow Scheme (RFS) and RGC Senior Research Fellow Scheme (SRFS), which will benefit post-doctoral fellows as well as researchers at associate professor and professor ranks respectively. It aims to support exceptionally outstanding academics at their mid-career at UGC-funded universities in Hong Kong. In each round of this yearly exercise, SRFS will support 10 awardees at full Professor rank at a UGC-funded university encompassing all academic disciplines.
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