Tsinghua Scholars Win Prestigious 2024 Tan Kah Kee Youth Science Award
On June 25, the award ceremony for the 2024 Tan Kah Kee Science Award and the Tan Kah Kee Youth Science Award was held at the 21st General Assembly of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. A total of 5 projects won the Tan Kah Kee Science Award and 10 young scientists won the Tan Kah Kee Youth Science Award. Among them, Zhu Jun, professor of the Department of Computer Science at Tsinghua University, won the Tan Kah Kee Youth Science Award for Information Technology Science, Ge Liang, associate professor of the School of Life Sciences at Tsinghua University, won the Tan Kah Kee Youth Science Award for Life Science, and Tian Yichao, a 2000 alumnus and researcher at the Institute of Mathematics and Systems Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, won the Tan Kah Kee Youth Science Award for Mathematical and Physical Sciences.
Zhu Jun received his bachelor’s degree and doctorate from the Department of Computer Science at Tsinghua University in 2005 and 2009, respectively, and then worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University in the United States. He is currently a professor at the Department of Computer Science and vice dean of the Institute of Artificial Intelligence at Tsinghua University. In 2020, he won the second “Science Exploration Award” and in 2023, he won the “Qiushi Outstanding Youth Achievement Transformation Award” of the China Association for Science and Technology. This time, he won the award for “proposing an efficient machine learning algorithm for large-scale diffusion probability models, which effectively improved the speed and quality of image generation.”
Ge Liang received his bachelor’s degree from the School of Life Sciences of Shandong Normal University in 2005, and his doctorate in biochemistry from the Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2011. He worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Berkeley from 2011 to 2015. He is currently an associate professor at the School of Life Sciences of Tsinghua University. In 2023, he won the fifth “Science Exploration Award”. This time, he was awarded for “revealing the non-classical targeting pathway of important proteins and a new autophagic degradation pathway of protein aggregates.”
Tian Yichao received his bachelor’s degree from the Basic Science Class of the Department of Physics at Tsinghua University in 2004, his master’s degree from the Department of Mathematics at Tsinghua University in 2008, and his doctorate from the University of Paris XIII in France in 2008. After graduation, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University. He is currently a researcher at the Institute of Mathematics and Systems Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Hua Luogeng Mathematics Chief Researcher. He won the 2022 Chinese Academy of Sciences Young Scientist Award. This time, he won the award for “making outstanding achievements in important fields such as the Langlands Program and the Beilinson-Bloch-Kato Conjecture by using the characteristic p-geometric properties of Shimura clusters.”
The predecessor of the Tan Kah Kee Science Award was the Tan Kah Kee Prize established in 1988. In 2003, with the approval of the State Council, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Bank of China jointly funded the establishment of the Tan Kah Kee Science Award Foundation and the Tan Kah Kee Science Award, which aims to reward major original scientific and technological achievements made in China recently. The Tan Kah Kee Youth Science Award was established in 2010 to reward young scientific and technological talents who have independently made important original scientific and technological achievements in China.
Both the Tan Kah Kee Science Award and the Tan Kah Kee Youth Science Award have six awards, namely, the Mathematical Science Award, the Chemical Science Award, the Life Science Award, the Earth Science Award, the Information Technology Science Award, and the Technical Science Award. The awards are organized and reviewed every two years based on the academic platform of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. As of 2024, a total of 41 projects and 55 scientists have won the Tan Kah Kee Science Award , and 42 young scientific and technological talents have won the Tan Kah Kee Youth Science Award .