According to the list of “2014 successive support for ‘innovation Research Team Program’” published by China's Ministry of Education (CME), a research team—“Molecular Materials for Optoelectronic Applications”, led by Professor Zhang Chi from Jiangnan University (JU), successfully rounded out a new round support from CME— an unprecedented accomplishment in JU history.
About at the end of July in 2014, an panel organized by CME, consisted of authoritative experts including 1 academician from Chinese Academy of Science, and 6 in total “National Outstanding Youth Foundation” and “Cheung Kong Scholars” winners from some Chinese prominent universities like Tsinghua, USTC, NJU, SEU and Fudan, conducted a formal review on Professor Zhang’s team, with the result of the “Excellent” rating on account of “remarkable achievements in research team construction as well as huge potential for development”. In order to further support the outstanding innovation research teams, yield significant research achievements and continuously enhance innovation capacity and comprehensive competitiveness,CME decided to provide an new-round support to some of the “2010 Innovation Research Teams Program” winners with splendid performance in team construction as well as in technological innovation and talent cultivation based on a process of official complete-program defence, evaluation with outstanding achievements, recommendation from their belonging institutions and an new round of expert evaluation.
“Innovative Research Team Program” was set up by CME so as to enhance innovation and competitiveness of technology teams in colleges and facilitate construction of high-level universities and key disciplines. Furthermore, successive support was designed to back up excellent innovative teams, promote formation of stable research direction and continuous innovation capacity and breed significant symbolic achievements. During the year of 2014, CME has offered successive support to a total of 58 innovative teams characterized with outstanding results in construction as well as high potential for development.
Team Introduction:
From 2011 to 2013, with the support of the Program of “Cheung Kong Scholars and Innovative Research Team Development”, the team “Functional Molecular Materials and Optical Nonlinearity” led by Professor Zhang Chi, as an backbone research team of China-Australia Joint Research Center for Functional Molecular Materials, had been carrying out systematic research on preparation for functional molecular materials as well as on optical nonlinearity, developing its characteristics and advantages by obtaining a series of important progress and achievements in nonlinear optical performance modulation for Functional clusters, nonlinear optical properties of Porphyrin covalent functionalization of carbon nanotubes and grapheme, and photoelectrocatalytic performance of inorganic nano-materials.
The team had successively undertaken 12 longitudinal research projects and succeeded in entering such research platforms at national or provincial level as National Innovative Talents Introducing Center (111 Project), National International Joint Research Center, Innovation Research Team in Key Areas supported by Ministry of Science and Technology as well as Jiangsu Innovation Team. During the period, the team members had published nearly one hundred SCI papers on international core journals in the field of materials science, chemistry and optics, and acquired 11 authorized national patents for invention out of 19 applications. In addition, it was honored the Overseas Innovative Team Contribution Award by All-China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese, Chinese Academy of Science and China Association for Science and Technology.
