About Song Gao’s work
Based at Peking University, Song Gao held a Croucher Visitorship at the University of Hong Kong.
Biography
Song Gao studied chemistry at Peking University, where he earned his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees and later became a professor. In 1995 he went to Germany as a visiting researcher at the Institute of Inorganic Chemistry at RWTH Aachen University.
Gao studies how the arrangement of atoms in a molecule affects its magnetic behaviour. His group designed and synthesised molecular magnets to investigate how magnetic ions interact and how their magnetisation changes over time. One of these magnets gave researchers a way to study a theoretical model in the laboratory. Its chain of magnetic ions exhibited behaviour that physicist Roy Glauber had predicted for a one-dimensional system.
In 2007 Gao was elected to the Chinese Academy of Sciences and became a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He later served as provost of Peking University and as president of South China University of Technology and Sun Yat-sen University.