Three Duke Kunshan University professors have been awarded tenure for their stellar contributions to research and education.
The newly promoted tenure-track faculty are: Dr. Chuanhui Gu, associate professor of environmental science; Dr. Selina Lai-Henderson, associate professor of American literature and history; and Dr. Feng Tian, professor of data science.
Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Dr. Scott MacEachern said they were promoted in recognition of their “outstanding accomplishments as educators, scholars and members of our university community”.
“Adding to our tenured faculty is a significant step in shaping the future of DKU, fulfilling its mission and advancing its broader impact,” he said.
Duke Kunshan University Board of Trustees conferred tenure on the trio in February following the recommendations of MacEachern and the university’s Appointment, Promotion and Tenure (APT) Committee.
The board has now approved a total of 24 tenure appointments since DKU was founded.
A system of indefinite appointments designed to support academic freedom, tenure is granted at Duke Kunshan to those who have produced work widely perceived among peers to be outstanding, are highly regarded for their teaching abilities and have made significant contributions to the university community.
The new tenure holders are:
Chuanhui Gu
Gu’s research focuses on pollutant transport and fate in a multimedia environment, particularly nutrient retention at the terrestrial-aquatic interface. His teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include environmental science, aqueous geochemistry, earth science, hydrology and ecology.
He has published more than 60 articles in prestigious journals and served as the University of North Carolina representative for the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Science. He served on proposal review panels for the U.S. National Science Foundation. He is a recipient of the Wachovia Environmental Award and Excellence in Refereeing from the American Geophysical Union.
Gu has a B.Sc. in environmental science from Nanjing University, an M.Sc. in environmental science from Sun Yat-sen University and a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. He served as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining Duke Kunshan, he held faculty positions at Appalachian State University and Beijing Normal University.
Selina Lai-Henderson
Lai-Henderson’s scholarship is at the heart of transnational American studies, where she locates works of American literature in 20th-century China and in translation.
The author of “Mark Twain in China” (Stanford UP, 2015), her current book-in-progress interrogates complex shifts of Afro-Asian discourses across the literary and cultural landscape of late Qing China through the Maoist era.
Her recent publications include “Langston Hughes and the Shanghai Jazz Scene” in “Langston Hughes in Context” (Cambridge UP, 2022) and “You Are No Darker Than I Am: The Souls of Black Folk in Maoist China” forthcoming with PMLA (Spring 2023).
She co-directs the Freedom Lab and is on the advisory board of the Humanities Research Center at DKU.
Prior to DKU, she was a Fulbright Scholar at Stanford University and a research assistant professor at Hong Kong University.
She is on the editorial board of Global Nineteenth Century Studies and is senior associate managing editor of the Journal of Transnational American Studies. She is co-chair of the American Studies Association’s international committee.
Feng Tian
Tian focuses his research on machine learning, with particular interest in developing advanced approaches on representation learning and data clustering.
He is a prolific researcher with more than 100 papers published in peer-reviewed journals and international conferences, including top-tier venues such as the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, IEEE Transactions on Visualization & Computer Graphics and ACM Transactions on Modelling & Computer Simulation.
In addition to his research, Tian is deeply committed to teaching and enjoys interacting with students. His teaching interests include programming, data structure, algorithms, machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Before joining DKU, Prof Tian was a faculty member at Bournemouth University in the UK and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He holds a B.Eng. and Ph.D. from Xi’an Jiaotong University in China.
