Last month, Gao became a full-time research professor at SUAT, a newly established research institution focused on developing talent for industries such as biomedicine and artificial intelligence, the South China Morning Post reported.
Prior to returning to China, Gao was a tenured associate professor at the Pennsylvania State University’s College of Medicine in the U.S..
There, he led a multi-year, multimillion-dollar project funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health to study how cells determine and maintain their identity.
Gao’s most influential studies include his 2012 paper in the scientific journal Cell, which discusses how gene-silencing proteins are assembled and function, and has been cited over 1,000 times by other researchers.
Leading brain development and gene regulation researcher, Gao Zhonghua. Photo courtesy of Pennsylvania State University
Gao earned his bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Science and Technology of China in 2001. A year later, he moved to the U.S. and obtained his PhD in physiology, biophysics, and systems biology from Cornell University and the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
He went on to conduct postdoctoral research at New York University’s School of Medicine and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In 2015, Gao joined the faculty at Penn State, where he was promoted to tenured associate professor in 2022.
At SUAT, Gao is now building his research team, recruiting faculty members, postdoctoral researchers, and laboratory technicians. According to the university’s website, the institution is offering competitive packages that include one-time living subsidies of nearly one million yuan (US$144,000) and annual research funding of around 500,000 yuan.
Gao’s move comes amid a broader wave of Chinese scientists returning from overseas in recent years.
According to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, about 20,000 ethnic Chinese scientists left the U.S. between 2010 and 2021, a trend that has continued, with several high-profile researchers returning to China in 2024 and 2025.
Most recently, quantum physicist You Chenglong, previously based at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, returned to China in January to take up a full-time professorship at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China in Chengdu.
Liang Jie, a leading computer vision researcher behind widely used Microsoft technologies and AI sensor systems for elderly care, has also left Canada last month to join the newly established Eastern Institute of Technology in Ningbo.
