New Kavli institutes

Two new Kavli institutes in China, one in the UK, and one in the US bring the total to 14. Like the earlier ones, the new Kavli institutes have multimillion-dollar endowments from the Oxnard, California-based Kavli Foundation and funding from the host institution, and are intended to become world-leading centers in their fields of research (see Physics Today, May 2004, page 32 ).

The Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics China (KITPC) in Beijing is a joint venture with the Institute for Theoretical Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The other new institute in China is at Peking University and focuses on astronomy and astrophysics. The University of Cambridge is setting up an institute in cosmology. And at Harvard University, the new Kavli institute focuses on the interface of biology and nanoscience.

Most of the Kavli institutes take a traditional format of bringing together experts in a specific field on a full-time basis. In contrast, the KITPC, which is modeled on the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, will have few full-time members and instead will use its $1 million annual budget to host several workshops each year. “We will be program driven,” says KITPC director Yue-Liang Wu. “This is totally new for China.” Terry Hwa of the University of California, San Diego, who is an adviser to the new institute, adds that the KITPC “is part of an overall plan to internationalize Chinese science. Hopefully the seed will grow.”