Personnel Matters | Can a Recently Graduated PhD Become a PhD Supervisor?

In recent years, an increasing number of young scholars born in the 1990s have stepped onto the academic stage.

According to an academic report released on the website of the College of Information and Electrical Engineering at China Agricultural University, 27-year-old Zhang Linfeng, a doctoral graduate from Tsinghua University’s 2024 cohort, has been appointed as an assistant professor and doctoral supervisor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

Born in 1997, Zhang’s research focuses on Efficient AI, including large models, image and video generation models, and compression and acceleration of AI datasets. He has published over 20 papers as the first or corresponding author in high-level academic conferences and journals such as CCF-A, which have been cited more than 2,000 times. He has served as a reviewer for multiple academic conferences including NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, CVPR, and ICCV, and has received honors such as Beijing Outstanding Graduate, Tsinghua University Excellent Doctoral Dissertation, Microsoft Scholar Scholarship (one of twelve in Asia), and Tsinghua University Jiang Nanxiang Scholarship.

In July of this year, the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences at Tsinghua University disclosed that Zhang Linfeng had chosen to teach at the School of Artificial Intelligence at Shanghai Jiao Tong University to conduct research and education, turning down lucrative salary offers from multiple companies.

Zhang is not an isolated case in recent years of doctoral graduates immediately becoming doctoral supervisors.

In January 2021, 25-year-old Feng Lei joined the College of Computer Science at Chongqing University, marking the first time the college had directly offered a full professor/doctoral supervisor position to a fresh doctoral graduate.

Feng Lei, who completed his direct doctoral program (and graduated early) at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, focuses his research on machine learning, data mining, and artificial intelligence. He has published over 10 papers as the first or corresponding author in international top-tier conferences (CCF A-level) and journals in the first quartile of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, including ICML, NeurIPS, KDD, CVPR, AAAI, and IJCAI, making significant contributions to the field of weakly supervised learning.

In July 2019, Li Lin, a female doctoral graduate born in 1991, was appointed as a professor in the School of Basic Medical Sciences at Southern Medical University and served as a doctoral supervisor. She pursued her doctoral degree at Peking University from September 2014 to June 2019.

Li’s research areas include developing single-cell multi-omics sequencing techniques and studying epigenetic regulation during the development of mammalian germ cells and the progression of diseases. In June 2018, she published a paper titled “Single-cell multi-omics sequencing of human early embryos” in Nature Cell Biology as the first author and co-authored papers in Cell titled “The Transcriptome and DNA Methylome Landscapes of Human Primordial Germ Cells” and in Cell Research titled “Single-cell multi-omics sequencing of mouse early embryos and embryonic stem cells”.

As the introducing unit for Li Lin, the official website of the School of Basic Medical Sciences at Southern Medical University lists her as an “excellent academic backbone”.

In April 2019, the Talent Work Office of Southern Medical University released a recruitment advertisement, announcing the introduction of a full-time high-level talent recruitment policy to sincerely invite talents from home and abroad to jointly achieve the goal of building a “first-class domestic and internationally influential multidisciplinary medical university”. Recruitment positions include special leading talents, leading talents in disciplines, excellent academic backbones, and excellent young scholars.

In February 2018, Han Shuangmiao graduated with a doctorate from the University of Oxford and was appointed as a researcher and doctoral supervisor under Zhejiang University’s “Hundred Talents Program” in March of the same year. She obtained a tenured position as an associate professor in 2021. Currently, Han Shuangmiao serves as the deputy director of the Institute of Educational Leadership and Policy at the School of Education, Zhejiang University.

In 2008, Han was admitted to the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at Tsinghua University. During her graduate studies, she chose to stay at the university to pursue a master’s degree in education. After graduating, she went to Oxford University for her doctoral studies, continuing her research in higher education.

Reflecting on her academic experiences at these two universities, she gained “a broad perspective, the ability to appreciate and tolerate the diversity of the world, the courage to pursue her true passions,” and “the opportunity to grow alongside the most talented and hardest-working people in the world.”

Doctoral education represents the pinnacle of China’s national education system and is a crucial manifestation of the country’s core competitiveness. Doctoral supervisors are the primary individuals responsible for the cultivation of doctoral students, shouldering the mission of nurturing high-level innovative talents.

To regulate the selection and evaluation of doctoral supervisors, the Ministry of Education issued the “Opinions on Strengthening the Management of Doctoral Supervisor Positions” in 2020,明确提出 strict political requirements for the positions, clarifying supervisors’ responsibilities, improving the selection and appointment system, strengthening supervisor training, establishing a comprehensive evaluation system, creating an incentive and demonstration mechanism, improving the system for changing supervisors, refining the exit procedures for the positions, standardizing position management, and enhancing the supervision and management mechanism.

Regarding the improvement of the selection and appointment system, the opinions point out that educational institutions should formulate comprehensive selection criteria for doctoral supervisors based on political quality, teaching ethics, academic level, educational ability, guidance experience, and cultivation conditions, avoiding simplistic reliance on publication records and research funding as the sole criteria for selection. Institutions should establish a well-defined selection and appointment process, adhere to fairness and transparency, strictly follow selection procedures, implement regular review and dynamic adjustment of admission qualifications, and ensure the quality of doctoral supervisor selection. The selection of teachers with associate professorships or lower ranks as doctoral supervisors should be strictly controlled. Before independently supervising doctoral students, doctoral supervisors should generally have experience in supervising master’s students or assisting in the supervision of doctoral students. For foreign, part-time, and off-campus supervisors, institutions should set specific selection requirements.