HKUST Faculty Win China’s State Science and Technology Awards
Prof Tianshou Zhao, Chair Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Director of Center for Sustainable Energy Technology, and Prof Qian Zhang, Professor of Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) were recognized with the most prestigious awards in science and technology in China - State Natural Science Award (Second Class) bestowed by the State Council of the People’s Republic of China. Another research project "Discovery and investigation of novel magnetocaloric effect materials" by Prof Xixiang Zhang, a former professor and now an Adjunct Professor at HKUST’s Physics Department, and the research team from the Institute of Physics Chinese Academy of Sciences also won the State Natural Science Award (Second Class).
The State Science and Technology Awards (SSTAs) are China’s most prestigious honor in science and technology. They are conferred by the State Council of the People’s Republic of China on outstanding individuals and institutions for their significant contributions to the development of science and technology. The State Natural Science Award is one of the categories under SSTAs
As a world-class research university, HKUST is committed to scientific and technological advancement in various disciplines. With major breakthroughs in a wide range of scientific pursuits, the award demonstrates HKUST faculty’s breadth of research talents and their outstanding performances.
"Investigations of multi-scale and multi-physics field coupled fluid flow and heat/mass transfer in complex systems" by Prof Tianshou Zhao
Through the Overseas Outstanding Scholars Project of National Natural Science Foundation of China and other collaborative projects, Prof Tianshou Zhao and researchers from the School of Energy and Power Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, have conducted collaborative research over the past decade. By the unique research methodology and strategy with integration of experimental observations, theoretical investigations, and computational modeling, the team made significant contributions in the field of heat/mass transfer in complex systems. The main breakthrough in this project is the construction of a framework that describes multi-scale and multi-physics field coupled fluid flow and heat/mass transfer processes by creating and using microscopic, mesoscopic and macroscopic theoretical and numerical approaches. Multi-scale and multi-physics field coupled fluid flow and heat/mass transfer problems are frequently encountered in many complex practical systems including energy, power, chemical, environmental, and biomedical processes and systems. The outcome resulting from the project is particularly important in improving the energy efficiency and reducing greenhouse gas emissions of energy conversion systems.
"Models for Joint Wireless Multimedia Communication and Performance Optimization" by Prof Qian Zhang
Prof Zhang and her partners from the Tsinghua University conducted collaborative research from 1998 to 2008. Starting from the fundamental nature of the wireless multimedia communication, the team revealed the interaction between the structured nature of multimedia information and the dynamic characteristics of the error distribution in wireless networks, established the modeling methodology and performance evaluation theory for multimedia processing and joint optimization in wireless network, made significant contributions to the development of the basic theory for wireless multimedia communication. The project made a major breakthrough in efficient video communications under the discontinuous transmission conditions, and effectively increasing bandwidth efficiency. The outcome resulting from the project is particularly useful for the design of future wireless video, mobile multimedia systems, as well as next-generation wireless networks.
