After more than two decades of distinguished work in the United States, geophysicist Niu Fenglin has returned to China to join the School of Earth and Space Sciences at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC).
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The award-winning scientist left his full professorship at Rice University in Houston, Texas – where he had worked since 2002 – in November, according to the USTC website.
Niu is the third person to be awarded the distinguished chair professorship, the highest position for overseas talent at USTC, one of China’s top universities, located in southeast Anhui province.
He is well known for his research on the deep structures within the Earth. Niu has been developing imaging techniques to map the seismic diversity of the Earth’s interior at various depths and scales to better understand the chemical and physical processes inside our planet.
Born in east China’s Jiangsu province in 1966, Niu graduated from USTC in 1988, and earned a PhD at the University of Tokyo in 1997. In 2002, he joined Rice University as an assistant professor.
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In 2008, Niu published research in the journal Nature that analysed 10 years of data from a portion of California’s San Andreas Fault that showed that subtle seismic changes that preceded earthquakes could be measured. The article, titled “A new step forward in earthquake prediction”, was widely reported internationally.
