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Shengcai SHI

Sheng-Cai SHI (male) is a senior researcher and doctoral supervisor of the Purple Mountain Observatory (PMO) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and is also the chief scientist of the Millimeter and Submillimeter Wave Laboratory at PMO. Currently, he severs as the chair of the PMO’s academic committee and the chair of the radio astronomy division of the Chinese Astronomical Society. He graduated from Southeast University (former Nanjing Institute of Technology) in 1985, received a master's degree from the Purple Mountain Observatory in 1988 and a doctor's degree from Japan’s Graduate University for Advanced Studies in 1996. He was awarded the Distinguished Young Researcher Scholarship from the National Natural Science Foundation of China in 1998, was awarded the Ho-Leung-Ho-Lee Foundation Science and Technology Progress Award in 2019, and was elected as an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2021.

Sheng-Cai Shi is mainly engaged in the research of physics, technology and application of superconducting detectors. The contributions of his team in this field include that 1) parallel-connected twin junctions (PCTJ) and distributed junction arrays were proposed to realize superconductor-insulator-superconductor (SIS) mixers with nearly quantum-limited sensitivity. Tuneless SIS mixers and high-energy-gap NbN SIS mixers were developed, paving the way for the application of complex systems like interferometers (e.g., ALMA) and space applications, respectively; 2) A frequency dependent nonequilibrium hot-spot model was proposed for superconducting hot-electron bolometer (HEB) mixers. And THz HEB mixers with the state-of-the-art sensitivity and the highest frequency were developed. Cutting-edge superconducting detectors (KID and TES) were developed firstly in China, as well as the first terahertz superconducting camera with a pixels number of more than 1000 pixels; 3) Developed superconducting detectors have been applied to the Delingha 13.7-m telescope and large astronomical projects like ALMA and SMA, and will be onboard the Chinese Space Station for the first space THz astronomical observation ever done in China.