Topic: 2023 Future Science Award
Sina Science and Technology News On the afternoon of August 16, the Future Science Awards Committee announced the winners list of 2023 on August 16. Chai Jijie and Zhou Jianmin won the "Life Science Award" for their pioneering work in discovering disease resistant bodies and clarifying their structure and functions in plant disease and insect resistance. Zhao Zhongxian and Chen Xianhui won the "Material Science Award" for their pioneering contributions to the breakthrough discovery of high-temperature superconductive materials and the systematic improvement of transition temperature. He Kaiming, Sun Jian (the late), Ren Shaoqing Zhang Xiangyu won the "Mathematics and Computer Science Award" for his fundamental contribution to artificial intelligence by proposing deep residual learning.
Future Science Award 2023 – Winners of Life Science Award
The winners of the "Life Science Award", Chai Jijie and Zhou Jianmin, were rewarded for their pioneering work in discovering disease resistant bodies and clarifying their structures and functions in plant disease and insect resistance.
Chai Jijie
Zhou Jianmin The outbreak of plant diseases has had a significant impact on social civilization. At present, 40% of global food production can be lost due to plant pests and pathogens. The discovery of plant resistance loci in the 1940s showed that plants have innate immune mechanisms. In 1994, the molecular cloning of plant resistance genes proved this hypothesis. These resistance genes encode nucleotide binding domains and leucine rich repeats of immune receptors, which constitute the main immune mechanism of plants against a variety of pathogens and some insects. However, how these immune receptors initiate plant defense response has always been a mystery.
Through 19 years of cooperation and efforts, Dr. Chai Jijie and Dr. Zhou Jianmin have established the composition, structure and function of immune receptor activated disease resistant bodies. They found that disease resistant bodies are multi-component complexes formed by immune receptor proteins after recognizing pathogen effectors, and found that this complex can cause plant immune responses including programmed cell death through the formation of calcium channels, thus protecting plants from infection. This discovery will lead to better plant disease control methods, which is of great significance for global food security. Therefore, Dr. Chai Jijie and Dr. Zhou Jianmin were awarded the Future Science Award - Life Science Award, in recognition of their pioneering contributions to the analysis of plant innate immune mechanism.
Chai Jijie, born in 1966 in Liaoning, China, received his PhD in analytical chemistry from the Institute of Medicine, Peking Union Medical College, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences in 1997.
Zhou Jianmin, born in 1964 in Sichuan, China, received a doctor's degree from the Department of Horticulture of Purdue University in 1994.
Future Science Award 2023 - Winners of Material Science Award
The winners of the "Material Science Award", Zhao Zhongxian and Chen Xianhui, commended their groundbreaking contributions to the breakthrough discovery of high temperature superconductors and the systematic improvement of transition temperature.
Zhao Zhongxian
Chen Xianhui As a quantum material, superconductors have unique zero resistance and complete diamagnetic properties, which have brought profound changes in energy, information, medical treatment, transportation, power and other fields, and have great application prospects. The transition temperature of traditional superconducting materials to superconducting state is very low (below - 230 ℃). The appearance of high temperature superconducting materials has greatly increased the temperature range in which superconductivity can exist. On the one hand, it provides more possibilities for the large-scale application of superconducting materials, and also reveals the complexity of the physical mechanism of the formation of superconductivity.
Zhao Zhongxian and Chen Xianhui have made outstanding contributions to the discovery and development of high-temperature superconducting materials. There are two main types of high temperature superconductors: copper oxide superconductors and iron based superconductors. In terms of copper oxide, the team led by Zhao Zhongxian independently discovered the first superconducting material at liquid nitrogen temperature. In terms of iron based superconductors, Chen Xianhui's research team first raised the superconducting transition temperature above the McMillan limit, proving that iron based superconductors are indeed unconventional high-temperature superconductors, while Zhao Zhongxian's research team created and maintained a record of superconducting transition temperature in blocky materials. While increasing the superconducting transition temperature, Zhao Zhongxian and Chen Xianhui have done a lot of systematic research on the physical mechanism of high-temperature superconductivity, which has promoted the development of high-temperature superconductivity in the past decades.
Zhao Zhongxian, born in Xinmin, Liaoning in 1941, graduated from the Department of Technical Physics of University of Science and Technology of China in 1964.
Chen Xianhui, born in Xiangtan, Hunan Province in 1963, received a doctor's degree in condensed matter physics from the University of Science and Technology of China in 1992.
2023 Future Science Award Winners of Mathematics and Computer Science Awards
He Kaiming, Sun Jian, Ren Shaoqing and Zhang Xiangyu, the winners of the "Mathematics and Computer Science Award", rewarded them for putting forward deep residual learning and making basic contributions to artificial intelligence.
He Kaiming
Sun Jian
Ren Shaoqing
Zhang Xiangyu Deep neural network promotes the revolution and development of artificial intelligence. Among them, increasing the depth of neural network is the key to bring breakthrough progress in many AI applications. The award-winning team proposed deep residual learning, which enabled the neural network to reach an unprecedented depth, acquire capabilities that were difficult to achieve before, and contributed to several breakthrough achievements - including AlphaGo, AlphaFold, and ChatGPT.
The award-winning work was completed by the four winners at Microsoft Asia Research Institute in Beijing from 2012 to 2016.
He Kaiming, Bachelor of Tsinghua University (2007), Doctor of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (2011).
Sun Jian, Bachelor (1997) and Doctor (2003) of Xi'an Jiaotong University.
Ren Shaoqing, bachelor of China University of Science and Technology (2011), doctor of China University of Science and Technology and Microsoft Asia Research Institute (2016).
Zhang Xiangyu, Bachelor of Xi'an Jiaotong University (2012) and Doctor of Xi'an Jiaotong University and Microsoft Asia Research Institute (2017).
The Future Science Award was established in 2016 and co sponsored by scientists and entrepreneurs. The Future Science Award focuses on original basic scientific research and rewards scientists who have made outstanding scientific achievements in mainland China (mainland), Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan (no nationality limit).
The award-winning work must also meet the following conditions:
（1） Have a huge international impact;
（2） Originality, long-term importance or time tested;
（3） It is mainly completed in mainland China (mainland), Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. The nationality of the completer is unlimited.
The Future Science Award currently has three major awards, namely, "Life Science Award", "Material Science Award" and "Mathematics and Computer Science Award", with a single award of 7.25 million yuan (equivalent to 1 million US dollars).
Since 2016, 35 winners of the Future Science Award have been selected. All of them are highly successful scientists from basic and applied research fields such as life science, physics, chemistry, mathematics, computer, etc., who have made original research work that has had great international influence.
The 2023 Future Science Awards Week will be held in Hong Kong for the first time in October. More than 70 world-class scientists from nine countries around the world will jointly discuss cutting-edge scientific issues at the Science Summit, share cutting-edge scientific information and forward-looking perspectives. The awarding ceremony and youth dialogue winners will be held in the Palace Museum of Culture in Hong Kong, which will be the most promising highlight, It is also a fusion and collision of science and culture.
