The New Cornerstone Investigator Program, a nonprofit and independent funding initiative funded by Tencent, unveiled its first batch of new cornerstone investigators on January 13. Hong Ding, Deputy Director and Chair Professor of T. D. Lee Institute, was selected as a leading condensed matter physicist.

The 2022 Program selected 58 investigators. Each investigator will be awarded an annual budget of up to 5 million RMB (for experimental research) or up to 3 million RMB (for theoretical research), for an initial five-year term. At the end of the term, investigators will be eligible for renewal of funding, contingent upon evaluation and approval.

The Program supports people, not projects. It supports passionate and creative scientists to take on exploratory and high-risk basic research projects that are of profound importance to humankind. Selected investigators are expected to tackle high-impact research questions, push boundaries, and make scientific breakthroughs.

Dr. Ding obtained his BS degree in physics from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 1990 and his Ph.D. degree in physics from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1995. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Argonne National Laboratory from 1996 to 1998. He joined the Department of Physics at Boston College as an assistant professor in 1998 and became an associate professor in 2003 and a full professor in 2007. He worked as managing director and chief scientist of Beijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics at the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences between 2008 and 2021. He joined Tsung-Tao Lee Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2022. Over the years, he has made important contributions to the understanding of high-temperature superconductors and topological materials by measuring their electronic structure using angle-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy. He has published more than 200 papers with a total citation number of over 11000. Dr. Ding won Sloan Research Fellowship Award in 1999 and was elected as American Physical Society Fellow in 2011.