KIAA’s Science Advisory Committee (SAC) held a two-day face-to-face meeting on March 28-29, 2015. In attendance were SAC chair Simon D. M. White (Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics), Tom Abel (Kavli Institue for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, Stanford University), Richard S. Ellis (California Institute of Technology), Martha P. Haynes (Cornell University), Yipeng Jing (Shanghai Jiaotong University), Robert C. Kennicutt (University of Cambridge), Fred K.-Y. Lo (National Radio Astronomy Observatory), Shude Mao (National Astronomical Observatories, CAS, and Tsinghua University), and, joining remotely, Ramesh Narayan (Harvard University).
PKU Vice-President, Prof. Jie Wang attended the meeting to give opening remarks and to express his warm support of KIAA. Academician Prof. Jiansheng Chen, founder of KIAA and of the Department of Astronomy, gave his personal perspective of the history of KIAA, its recent developments, and its future role domestically and internationally. Prof. Luis C. Ho，KIAA’s director，gave an in-depth overview of the development of astronomy in China, KIAA’s current status and recent developments, and its near-term and long-term plans. Prof. Fukun Liu, DoA chairman, discussed the status of DoA. Prof. Xuebing Wu, KIAA’s associate director, gave a financial report for KIAA. Science highlight talks were presented by faculty members Subo Dong, Greg Herczeg, Linhua Jiang, and Qingjuan Yu; postdoctoral fellow Lucas Uhm; graduate students Beibei Liu and Congyao Zhang; and undergraduate students Yuguang Chen and Mengxiang Lin.
SAC members had separate lunch meetings with postdocs and graduate students, and then closed-door meetings with all members of the faculty and administrative staff, to assess the performance of the institute and the management style of the current leadership. The SAC is in the process of preparing a final report to be delivered to the presidents of PKU and the Kavli Foundation.
