On the morning of August 16, 2024, at 10:00, the Future Science Prize, the first science prize in China initiated by scientists and entrepreneurs and awarded by a civilian non-profit organization, announced the winners of the 2024 Life Science Prize, Material Science Prize, and Mathematics and Computer Science Prize. Each awardee will receive a prize of one million US dollars.

Life Science Prize recipient: Deng Hongkui

Material Science Prize recipients: Zhang Tao, Li Yadong

Mathematics and Computer Science Prize recipient: Sun Binyong

Image: Shu Qiwang, a professor at Brown University in the United States and an expert in computational mathematics, delivered a speech as the 2024 rotating chairman of the Future Science Awards Science Committee.

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2024 Life Science Prize

Recipient of the 2024 Life Science Prize: Deng Hongkui (Professor at Peking University)

Reason for the award: In recognition of his outstanding work in pioneering the use of chemical methods to reprogram somatic cells into pluripotent stem cells, changing cell fate and state.

Deng Hongkui is a Boya Distinguished Professor at Peking University, Director of the Peking University Stem Cell Research Center, a Senior Researcher at the Tsinghua-Peking University Joint Center for Life Sciences, and a recipient of the National Outstanding Youth Science Foundation. He was elected as a member of the Board of Directors of the International Society for Stem Cell Biology (ISSCR) from 2010 to 2016 and is currently a director of the International Society for Regenerative Biology (ISRB). For many years, Professor Deng Hongkui has been engaged in stem cell and regenerative medicine research. He was the first to establish the technology of inducing pluripotent stem cells (CiPS) using small chemical molecules. He has published more than 170 papers in journals such as Nature, Science, Cell, and Cell Stem Cell, with more than 18,000 citations. After years of unremitting efforts, Professor Deng Hongkui’s team has achieved a number of breakthrough and original results in the research of chemical small molecules regulating cell fate, providing new ideas for the change of cell fate, creating new methods for chemical reprogramming and preparation of functional cells, and providing new solutions for future application in the field of regenerative medicine and the treatment of major diseases.

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2024 Material Science Prize

Recipients of the 2024 Material Science Prize: Zhang Tao (Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences) and Li Yadong (Tsinghua University)

Reason for the award: “For their pioneering contributions to the development and application of ‘single-atom catalysis.

Zhang Tao

After obtaining his Ph.D. at the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1989, Zhang Tao was a visiting scholar at the University of Birmingham in the UK from 1989 to 1990. Upon returning to China, he successively held positions such as deputy group leader, group leader, director, deputy director, and party committee secretary at the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics. He once served as the director of the National Catalysis Engineering Technology Research Center and was the director of the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics from February 2007 to February 2017. From December 2016 to September 2023, he served as the vice president and party member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

He has long been engaged in research in the field of chemical engineering. The new type of catalyst he was responsible for developing has been widely used in China’s petrochemical and other fields, and he has won the second prize of the National Technical Invention Award three times as the first completer. Recently, he has mainly been engaged in research on non-toxic propellant catalytic decomposition technology, biomass catalytic conversion, single-atom catalysis, and nanocatalysis; the team he led was the first in the world to discover a new reaction for the one-step catalytic conversion of cellulose to ethylene glycol (Angew.Chem.Int.Edit.,2008,47,8510–8513);

He was the first to propose the concept of “single-atom catalysis” (Nature Chemistry,2011,3,634 – 641); his recent research results on single-atom catalysis were selected by the American Chemical Society’s Chemical Engineering News (C&EN) as the “Top Research” in the field of chemical engineering for 2016. He has published more than 400 papers in international journals and applied for more than 200 invention patents.

Main academic part-time positions he has held or is currently holding include: Chief Scientist of the National 973 Project, Deputy Group Leader of the National 863 Plan Expert Group, Vice Chairman of the Chinese Petroleum Society, Vice Chairman of the Chinese Space Science Society, Deputy Director of the Space Materials Professional Committee, Member of the Catalysis Committee of the Chinese Chemical Society, Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, Director of the Sino-French Joint Laboratory for Sustainable Energy on the Chinese side, Director of the Mössbauer Effect Data Center, Deputy Director of the Academic Committee of the National Key Laboratory of Chemical Engineering, Editorial Board or Advisory Editorial Board of international journals such as Applied Catalysis B: Environmental, ChemPhyChem, ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering, and Industry & Engineering Chemistry Research, Co-Editor-in-Chief of “Catalysis Journal.”

Li Yadong

Born in Susong County, Anhui Province in November 1964. He graduated from the Chemistry Department of Anhui Normal University in 1986 and successively obtained his master’s and doctoral degrees in 1991 and 1998. He is a professor at the Department of Chemistry, Tsinghua University. He has successively won the second prize of the National Natural Science Award in 2001 and 2008. In 2011, he was elected as an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and in 2014, he was elected as an academician of the Third World Academy of Sciences. He currently serves as the editor-in-chief of academic journals: “Nano Research” and “Science China Materials”. He is mainly engaged in the research of inorganic nanomaterial synthesis chemistry and is currently committed to challenging metal clusters and single-atom catalysts to achieve the substitution of non-precious metals for precious metal catalysts, exploring new catalytic reactions, and solving the technical problems of homogeneous catalysis and heterogeneous industrialization of catalysts.

He has published more than 300 academic papers in international academic journals including Science, Nature (and its sub-journals), JACS, Angew Chem, PRL, Adv Mater., Nano Letters, etc., and has been cited more than 40,000 times (H-index over 100). He has successively trained more than 30 senior researchers such as doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows, 1 person won the international “IUPAC Young Chemist Award” (2005), 4 people won the “National Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award” (2 people were nominated), 6 people have received support from the “National Outstanding Youth Science Fund”, and 8 people have won the “Outstanding Youth Fund” and other talent titles.

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2024 Mathematics and Computer Science Prize

The recipient of the 2024 Mathematics and Computer Science Prize is Sun Binyong.

Reason for the award: “For his outstanding contributions to the representation theory of Lie groups.”

Professor and doctoral supervisor at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Mathematics, Zhejiang University. Born in Zhoushan, Zhejiang in November 1976, he graduated from the Department of Mathematics at Zhejiang University in 1999 and obtained his Ph.D. from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2004. In 2019, he was elected as an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. His research areas include the representation theory of Lie groups and automorphic forms, especially in the study of infinite-dimensional representations of classical groups, L-functions, and their interconnections, where he has achieved a series of important results. He has won awards such as the Chen Jiageng Youth Science Award (2014), the China Outstanding Young Science and Technology Talent Award (2016), the Chinese Academy of Sciences Youth Scientist Award (2016), and the second prize of the National Natural Science Award (2018).

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Introduction to the Future Science Prize

The Future Science Prize were established in 2016 and are a world-class science award jointly initiated by scientists and entrepreneurs. The Future Science Prize focus on original basic scientific research and reward scientists (of any nationality) who have made outstanding scientific and technological achievements in Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. The awards are nominated by invitation and reviewed by a professional committee composed of outstanding scientists, adhering to the principles of justice, fairness, and credibility, and maintaining the independence of the awards.

The work of the Future Science Prize winners must meet the following conditions at the same time:

(1) It has a huge international impact;
(2) It has originality, long-term importance, or has been tested over time;
(3) It is mainly completed in Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. The nationality of the completers is not limited.

The Future Science Prize currently set up three major awards: “Life Science Prize,” “Material Science Prize,” and “Mathematics and Computer Science Prize,” with a single prize of about 6.75 million yuan (equivalent to 1 million US dollars).

【Editor’s note】The above content (~8300 words) is a quick translation of a Chinese article (posted on 2024-08-18) by DrugTimes team. To read the original article, please click here. All comments are warmly welcome. Many thanks!