Gifted students revel in a class of their own

To help celebrate the 60th anniversary of USTC, a large number of alumni will gather at a celebratory event on Thursday.

This year is also the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Class of the Gifted Young, which opened in 1978 and became the School of the Gifted Young in 2008.

To illustrate the development of the school, the college has organized an exhibition that contains photos of many renowned alumni, mostly scientists.
Most share the same distinction－they became prominent in their fields at very young ages, with several becoming professors at leading universities across the world while only in their 20s.

One of the names on the long list was Cao Yuan, who graduated from the School of the Gifted Young in 2014 and is now a 21-year-old PhD candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

On March 5, the journal Nature published two articles on major breakthroughs in graphene research in which Cao was lead author.
Though he appreciates Cao's success, Zhu has no plans to follow in his footsteps.

"I won't study overseas because I have a research place in Professor Du Jiangfeng's laboratory, which is the best in the world for research on quantum information," he said. Half of the researchers in Du's laboratory are graduates of the School of the Gifted Young.

Du, who was born in 1969 and graduated from the class in 1990 after five years of study, is not only vice-president of USTC, but also director of its Key Laboratory of Microscale Magnetic Resonance.

When he was elected to the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2015, Du became the first graduate of the class to be accorded the honor.