Professor Flemming Besenbacher, Aarhus University, Denmark, has been appointed Honorary Professor at two additional leading Chinese universities for his contributions to word-leading research and research management. He will receive the titles from Chongqing University in Central China and Tongji University in Shanghai.
Since the beginning of the ‘80s, Prof. Besenbacher has performed groundbreaking research in the field of surface science. His research has provided atomic-level information on fundamental chemical processes occurring in, e.g. industrial catalysts or biological self-assembly processes.
Prof. Besenbacher’s group has built one of the best instruments in the world, the so-called Aarhus Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM), for visualizing the structure and movement of atoms on surfaces. The fantastic resolution of such STM “movies” is both visually tantalizing and unique for providing important scientific insight.
Prof. Besenbacher has also been instrumental in promoting a national strategy for Sino-Danish scientific collaboration. During the past decade, Prof. Besenbacher has given numerous guest lectures to advance the quality of education and research at several Chinese universities and research institutes. His great contribution to Chinese education and research has already been recognized with a number of honorary professorship awards and last year he was awarded the prestigious Einstein Chair Professorship from the Chinese Academy of Science.
Many Chinese PhD students and post docs have been associated with Prof. Besenbacher’s research group, and the first PhD student came to his lab in 1990 from Prof. Chunli Bai, Deputy Vice-President of CAS, a personal friend of Prof. Besenbacher, and Honorary Doctor from Aarhus University.
Recently, Prof. Besenbacher has been granted a Sino-Danish basic research center, funded by the Danish Basic Research Foundation, which he directs in collaboration with Prof. Chen Wang, Director of the Chinese National Center for Nanoscience and Technology in Beijing.
