Andre Geim, the 67-year-old Nobel Prize-winning physicist known in China as the “father of graphene”, will join the University of Hong Kong as a chair professor in April, according to the university.
Geim, who led a team at the University of Manchester to isolate graphene – the world’s thinnest and strongest material, consisting of a single layer of carbon atoms – using adhesive tape in 2004, is set to leave Britain after spending more than two decades of his career there.
Geim said he was drawn to Hong Kong’s distinctive East-West synergy and world-class infrastructure.
“I’m excited to collaborate with outstanding colleagues here and to contribute to discoveries that will matter globally.”
A vocal advocate of international scientific collaboration, Geim has maintained close ties with Chinese researchers and has been a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences since 2017.
In an interview in October with MIT Technology Review China in Shanghai, Geim said his first PhD student in Manchester was from China. Jiang Da, now a researcher at Zhejiang University of Technology, was tasked with making graphite as thin as possible.
“It did not go anywhere for a long time until we used Scotch tape,” Geim said. He and his team – including Jiang and Konstantin Novoselov, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics alongside Geim in 2010 – placed the tape under a microscope and spotted ultra-thin, transparent flakes of graphene. “That was a eureka moment for the whole group.”
Geim has trained dozens of Chinese graduate students over the course of his career, according to MIT Technology Review China. He has also worked closely with companies and research institutes in China, which he described as “a leader in both industrial application and basic research” in graphene technologies.
Geim was born in Sochi, Russia, in 1958. His parents were German and both his father and grandfather were physicists. He obtained his PhD in physics from the Russian Academy of Sciences in Chernogolovka, a town near Moscow.
He conducted postdoctoral research in Britain and Denmark before securing a tenured position as an associate professor at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands in 1994. He joined the University of Manchester in 2001.
Among numerous academic titles and honours, Geim is the only person to have won both a Nobel Prize and an Ig Nobel Prize – the latter in 2000 for using magnets to levitate a live frog.
His new appointment comes as Hong Kong seeks to compete in an increasingly fierce international race for top scientific talent.
“Professor Geim’s ambition in discovery – turning fundamental science into world-changing innovation – perfectly aligns with our vision to be a world-leading university transforming humanity’s future,” HKU president and vice-chancellor Xiang Zhang said.
(South China Morning Post)