Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) is a public and dynamic university established in 2012 by the provincial government of Guangdong and the Shenzhen Municipality with the aim of developing a new type of tertiary education and becoming a world-class research university. It is located in the rapidly-growing tech capital city of Shenzhen. In recent years, SUSTech has very rapidly been recognized as a world-class university.
SUSTech recently launched the SUSTech Fellowship Program to sponsor PhD students with candidacy confirmed from the top 150 universities (according to the THE, QS, US News, or ARWU ranking) or Universities in Hong Kong and Macau to visit SUSTech and conduct cutting-edge collaborative research for a year (12 months) or two years (24 months). Each selected fellow will receive a stipend of RMB 200,000 yuan (approximately 30,000 US dollars, pre-tax) per year. Fellows will receive the stipend monthly. The visiting student needs to have his/her PhD supervisors' support and approval as well as a host faculty at SUSTech. Application deadlines: April 1st for visits in the autumn semester. October 1st for visits in the spring semester.
About the host: Dr. He Kong joined SUSTech in early 2022, where he is currently an Associate Professor. He received the Ph.D. degree (advised by Graham Goodwin and Maria Seron) in Electrical Engineering from the University of Newcastle, Australia. He was a Research Fellow in Salah Sukkarieh’s team at the Australian Centre for Field Robotics, the University of Sydney, Australia, during 2016-2021. His current research interests include active perception, robot audition, optimization-based estimation/control, and machine learning applications, amongst others. He is on the editorial board of the Journal of Smart Agriculture (published in both Chinese and English), sponsored by the Agricultural Information Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. He has also served as an Associate Editor for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (IEEE RA-L), IEEE ICRA 2023, IEEE IROS 2023, and the 15th IEEE/SICE Int. Symposium on System Integrations (SII 2023). Dr. Kong's team currently has 6 master students, and 2 PhD students, and is steadily growing - it is expected that 2-3 postdoc researchers and 1 PhD student from overseas will join the team later this year.
The collaborative research topics for the visiting PhD student can be generally in the domains of robotics and automation, preferably in areas that are of mutual interest. Dr. Kong's team currently focuses on active perception (path planning under unknown disturbances), robot audition (calibration of robot audition systems, learning-based aural scene understanding and reconstruction), and optimization-based estimation/control (state/parameter estimation under unknown inputs).
Interested candidates are encouraged to contact Dr. Kong via email: kongh@sustech.edu.cn
For visiting in the autumn semester and the spring semester, please contact preferably before March 1st and September 1st, respectively, to allow for preparing required documents and paperwork.
When contacting, please attach the CV and a cover letter briefly describing the candidate's ideas for joint research topics.
