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A Brief Introduction to the Kavli Foundation and KIAA-PKU

The Kavli Foundation of the United States was founded by Norwegian physicist and industrialist Fred Kavli in December 2000. Headquartered in Santa Barbara, California, its current Executive President is David Auston, a physicist and a member of the American National Academy of Sciences and of the National Academy of Engineering. Dedicated to the advancement of basic sciences for the benefit of humanity, the Kavli Foundation supports scientific researches in the fields of astrophysics, nanoscience and neuroscience. Since the founding of the first Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at UC Santa Barbara in December 2001, the Kavli Foundation has hitherto funded 15 Kavli institutes at major universities in the United States, Europe and China. The institutes are led by world-class scientists. Amongst them three are Nobel laureates while others are members of eminent organizations including the American National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Royal Society of the United Kingdom. The Kavli Foundation also honors scientific achievement and promotes public understanding of scientists and their work through the Kavli prizes in the above three fields.

On June 16, 2006, Peking University signed an official agreement with the Kavli Foundation to establish the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University (KIAA-PKU). KIAA-PKU is located at the tranquil and scenic Langrunyuan on the north bank of Weiming Lake, adjacent to China Center for Economic Research, the International Center for Mathematical Sciences and the School of Humanity Studies. In January 2007, after a worldwide search, Professor Douglas D.N.C. Lin, a leading theoretical astrophysicist based at UC Santa Cruz and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, was appointed as the founding Director of KIAA-PKU. Peking University has also appointed five well-known international scholars to serve on the Advisory Committee of the Institute, chaired by Frank Hsia-san Shu, a UC professor and a member of the American National Academy of Sciences.

KIAA-PKU operates following an international management system and recruits faculty and post-doctorates worldwide. It will carry out fundamental research on the origin and evolution of astrophysical structures, from the scale of stars and planetary systems up to the universe as a whole. KIAA-PKU is dedicated to become a world-class astronomy and astrophysics research center of excellence in China and in Asia and the Pacific region. It will promote the basic scientific research in China with the highest international standards and act as a bridge between the scientific communities of the emerging and developed countries.