SHANGHAI – General Motors set up a postdoctoral workstation in China this month, deepening its collaboration with the country’s academic community to accelerate cutting-edge R&D at the forefront of innovation.
Certified by the Office of China Postdoc Council, the workstation is part of the Shanghai Pudong New Area Corporate Postdoctoral Research Station and the first of its kind introduced by a foreign automaker in China. It will build upon the solid foundation of application-oriented fundamental research being carried out at the GM China Science Lab in Shanghai and benefit from the facility’s deep engagement in lab-to-market innovation and its broad connection with automotive suppliers across the entire industry value chain.
“We look forward to working with high-potential researchers to pursue synergies between industry and academia,” said Dr. Jeff Wang, site leader of the GM China Science Lab. “Our goal is to incubate game-changing technologies that will profoundly impact future mobility and yield significant returns to GM through successful commercialization in an open innovation ecosystem.”
Academic engagement has been pivotal in GM’s innovation best practices in China, such as the development and deployment of third-generation advanced high-strength steel. The first postdoctoral researcher is now on board at GM China’s Advanced Materials Lab as GM runs the postdoctoral workstation in close partnership with China’s Northeastern University.
The initial tasks include commercialization of advanced aluminum castings for the lightweighting of electric vehicles, and fundamentals and application-related development of low-density advanced high-strength steels – both in close collaboration with the State Key Laboratory of Rolling and Automation at Northeastern University.
With a typical two-year tenure for each researcher, the postdoctoral program will keep the GM China Science Lab at the forefront of advanced materials and manufacturing, advanced propulsion systems, battery cells and intelligent connected vehicles. It will leverage China’s research and industrial strengths to support GM’s global technology development and enable its vision of zero crashes, zero emissions and zero congestion.
“People and technology are at the heart of our business,” said GM China Chief Technologist Dr. John Du. “GM will continue to invest in talent and encourage innovation as part of our unwavering commitment to the long-term development of China’s automotive industry.”
GM was an early proponent of high-end talent development and fundamental scientific research related to the automotive industry. It set up the GM China Science Office in 1995 and partnered with many leading universities in the country, which paved the way for the establishment of the GM China Science Lab in 2009. Since then, researchers from the GM China Science Lab have created more than 200 inventions globally, all of which have been granted patents or are in the patent approval process.
Over the past decade, the GM China Science Lab has developed a world-class research team consisting completely of local talent, with about half of its employees holding doctoral degrees.
Its academically acclaimed and product-ready innovations include the direct remote laser welding process and system and an all-new high-power battery. They won the prestigious R&D 100 Award in 2017 and 2019 respectively, which is a global honor regarded as the “Oscars of invention” by the R&D community. In addition, the new high-strength casting aluminum alloy material A345 developed by the GM China Science Lab debuted on the 2020 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray and won the High Integrity Structure Casting Award for 2019 from the North America Die Casting Association.