Our collaborator and former fellow, Na Sun, defended her doctorate in at East China Normal University in Shanghai, China, o May 9, 2026! 

Dr. Na Sun spent 12 months as a fellow of the Chinese Scholarship Council (CSC) in the Center for Public Policy Studies in 2024/2025.

I successfully defended my PhD dissertation at East China Normal University on May 9, 2026. The dissertation was completed at the Institute of Higher Education, Faculty of Education, under the supervision of Prof. YAN Guangcai.

The title of her dissertation was: “Characteristics and Career Trajectories of National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars in STEM Fields in China”.

Her dissertation examines 3,949 recipients of the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars in STEM fields in China from 1994 to 2020. It investigates how research funding and talent programs function as institutional signals and how they shape the collective structure and career trajectories of elite scientists. The study focuses on four dimensions: collective structure, organizational and spatial configuration, critical event effects, and process mechanisms. Methodologically, it combines descriptive statistics, social and complex network analysis, piecewise linear regression, event study, propensity score matching, multi-period difference-in-differences, and text analysis.

The findings show that Distinguished Young Scholars in STEM fields are highly concentrated in leading universities and research institutions, with clear patterns of platform agglomeration, structural stratification, and regional clustering. The group also shows a strong gender imbalance, an increasing age at the time of funding, and a dominant career pattern combining domestic doctoral training with overseas postdoctoral experience. The dissertation further finds that the funding event affects different dimensions of academic output in different ways, including research quality, collaboration structure, international cooperation, mobility effects, and organizational embedding. Overall, the dissertation argues that high-level talent policies should pay more attention to how institutional recognition can be converted into long-term research capacity, stable organizational support, and sustained innovation.

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