KTH Researcher Named Honorary Professor in China
IN BRIEF
Börje Johansson, Professor of Applied Materials Physics at KTH, is the first Swedish academic to be appointed honorary professor at Tsinghua University in China.
Johansson has had a longstanding relationship with Tsinghua, ranked among the foremost universities in China, since the 1970s. He has collaborated extensively with researcher Gu Bin Lin, who was president of Tsinghua until this year.
As an honorary professor, Johansson will be able to expand his research activity at Tsinghua, and will have access to a larger pool of PhD students. “It's an incredible privilege for a foreign university in a small country like Sweden to be granted this interface,” Johansson said. “This will open up unique opportunities us at KTH to find talented partners.”
Organised cooperation between KTH and Tsinghua University has been in place since 2004 at both the undergraduate and graduate level, with research collaboration primarily in nuclear reactor technology and smart grids. The two universities jointly operate a reactor physics research centre.
Although he's the first Swede to win the prestigious appointment as honorary professor at Tsingua, Johansson is not the first Westerner. His colleagues in the new position include two prominent American researchers: James D. Watson, geneticist and co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule, and Vint Cerf, the computer scientist recognised one of the “fathers of the Internet.”
By Christer Gummeson
