Prof. Rolf Mueller Won the 2010 National Friendship Award

In the afternoon of September 29^th, the 2010 Friendship Award Ceremony for Foreign Experts was held in the Great Hall of the People. Zhang Dejiang, a member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee and Vice-Premier of the State Council attended the ceremony and delivered a speech. Ji Yunshi, Director-General of the State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs read the list of 50 foreign experts who won the Friendship Award. Prof. Rolf Mueller, SDU "Taishan Scholar" and world famous specialist in bioinspired science and technology was among the 50 experts. He and Dr. Anne P. Underhill are the only two SDU professors who have won this award.

In 2005 Prof. Mueller introduced the Customized Intelligent Life-Inspired Arrays (CILIA), an EU funded international project to SDU, which made SDU the only partner of this project in China. He also undertook a National Natural Science Foundation project----Research on the Models of Biomimetic Adaptive Beam Based on the Pinnae and Noseleaves of Bats which opened a brand new discipline for SDU ---- the biosonar study and established the laboratory for bio-acoustic physics. In October 2008, Prof. Mueller was offered a faculty position at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Since then, he had been making efforts to promote the scholars exchange, scientific research cooperation, distance education, joint cultivation of talent, and language training of the two universities. In October 2010 the two universities signed the memorandum of understanding on inter-collegiate cooperation and established the SDU-VT Joint Laboratory. The research paper of an SDU doctoral student under the supervision of Prof. Mueller was published in the first page of Physical Review Letters. Another research paper of an SDU doctoral student under the supervision of Prof. Mueller was published in Physical Review B and was acknowledged as Research Highlights by Nature. The research results of graduate students under the supervision of Prof. Mueller has been published in Physical Review Lettersfor three years in a row.

The Friendship Award was established in 1991 to award the foreign experts who achieved significantly in economic and social development of China. Since then, 1,149 foreign experts from 60 countries have won the award. The 50 winners of this year are from 16 countries, covering areas such as industry and agriculture, energy and environmental protection, educational technology, medical and health care and culture and sports.

By Cui Xinyuan