Penn State Graduate School alumnus Bin Luo received the Graduate School Alumni Society (GSAS) Early Career Award. This award was established to recognize alumni who have demonstrated exceptional success in their chosen field within the first ten years after obtaining their graduate degree. 

Luo has earned acclaim as a smart, highly driven, efficient, independent, meticulous, and phenomenally well-organized astronomer who is now becoming a leader in worldwide astrophysics research.  

Luo has served as a professor of astronomy and space science at Nanjing University in China since 2015.  Within the School of Astronomy and Space Science, he serves as a member of the Galaxies and Cosmology Group.

The group’s research focuses on galaxy-center black hole activities, starburst galaxies and active galactic nuclei, chaos in the galaxy and cluster dynamics, and cosmological evolution of galaxies and black holes. 

After receiving a doctoral degree in astronomy and astrophysics from Penn State in 2010, Luo served as a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics for one year, and a postdoctoral fellow at Penn State for three years. 

Prior to his faculty appointment at Nanjing University in 2015, Luo was selected for China’s prestigious Thousand Talents Youth Award, which recognizes young professionals who are renowned as elites among peers in their field and possess the potential of becoming leading figures in the future.

Luo also holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and physics from Tsinghua University and a master’s degree in astrophysics from the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Luo was recognized at the annual GSAS Recognition Dinner on March 23.