Recently, Dr. Xiaokun Wang, a young teacher in the School of Computer and Communication Engineering, has been awarded a prestigious Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (MSCA-IF) worth €224,934 by European Commission. The fellowships are funded by the European Framework Programme for Research and Innovation, Horizon 2020. He will undertake a new research project “ Multi-level Multi-phase Fluid Animation” in collaboration with Prof. Jian Chang at National Centre for Computer Animation, Bournemouth University in the next two years.

By coupling research and innovation, Horizon 2020 provides excellent science, industrial leadership and tackles societal challenges, was officially launched in the UK on January 31, 2014. The goal is to ensure that Europe produces world-class science, removes barriers to innovation and hindrances for the public and private sectors to work together in delivering innovation.

The Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action (MSCA), named after the Polish-French two-time Nobel laureate Marie Curie, belongs to excellent science of the three strategic priorities in Horizon 2020. The MSCA-IF enjoys a high reputation in the world and is one of the highest awards for individual scientific research funded by the European Commission. It aims to support the world's experienced researchers to carry out cooperative research with Europe in order to promote scientific progress. According to the statistics of evaluation results released by the European Research Council, the award rate for the engineering field in 2020 is only about 13% globally, with about 124 funded projects.

Dr. Xiaokun Wang, graduated from the School of Computer and Communication Engineering, University of Science and Technology Beijing (USTB) in January 2017, and has been working in the school since then. His research fields is computer graphics and virtual reality, especially physics-based fluid animation. He is the Principal investigator (PI), Co-PI and researcher of 12 projects including the National Natural Science Foundation of China, National Key Research and Development Program of China, the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation, and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China. In recent years, he has published more than 20 papers in high-level academic conferences and journals, such as ACM SIGGRAPH, IEEE VR, CGI, CGF, NCA, JVLC. He has been awarded the outstanding postdoctoral fellow of USTB, the first prize of Science and Technology Progress of China Gold Association, and the first prize of Guangxi Excellent Urban Planning and Design.

Dr. Xiaokun Wang is working at the Artificial intelligence and 3D visualization Laboratory led by Prof. Xiaojuan Ban (http://ustb-ai3d.cn/index) in USTB. The team has made a series of excellent research achievements in artificial intelligence, computer vision, natural human-computer interaction, computer graphics, virtual reality, etc. The award of the "Marie Curie Individual fellowship" is an important achievement of the team in international academic exchanges and cooperation and the training of young teachers.