Liang Dai

Liang Dai is an astrophysicist and 2021 Sloan Research Fellow who left his assistant professorship in the Department of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley in 2026 to join Fudan University in Shanghai as a professor in its Department of Physics and Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Born in Hangzhou in 1988, Dai earned his B.S. in Physics from Peking University in 2011 before completing a PhD in theoretical cosmology at Johns Hopkins University in 2015. He then held postdoctoral fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, including a NASA Einstein Fellowship (2015-2018) and a John Bahcall postdoctoral fellowship (until 2020), before joining UC Berkeley as an assistant professor in 2020.

Dai specialises in theoretical and observational cosmology and astrophysics, focusing on gravitational lensing and the search for binary black holes, along with methods to extract physical parameters from gravitational wave sources. In 2021 he received the Sloan Research Fellowship in Physics, a highly selective award for early-career researchers in the US and Canada that has produced 60 future Nobel laureates. At Fudan, he also co-teaches an undergraduate program with Nanjing University giving students access to major Chinese astronomy facilities, including the Purple Mountain Observatory and the FAST radio telescope in Guizhou.