As part of its broader funding announcements, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) announced that Assistant Professor Zhang Zhenguo from the Department of Earth and Space Sciences (ESS) at Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) is a recipient of funding under the Excellent Young Scientists Fund.

Zhang Zhenguo received a bachelor’s degree in geophysics from Wuhan University in 2008 and a Ph.D. in solid geophysics from the School of Earth and Space Sciences of the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 2014. Zhang Zhenguo was an assistant researcher and postdoctoral fellow at the School of Earth and Space Sciences at USTC. He then joined the Department of Earth and Space Sciences of SUSTech in December 2016 as an assistant professor.

At present, Zhang Zhenguo is researching on the rupture dynamics of earthquake. He proposed a method of simulating dynamic rupture on non-planar faults by using the curved grid finite-difference method. This is one of the few numerical methods that can simulate rupture dynamics of complex faults. Until now, Zhang Zhenguo has published 23 papers in journals related to seismology, including 12 SCI papers, as the first or correspondent author.

Zhang Zhenguo has also participated in many international organizations’ comparative verification work on seismic wave propagation and rupture dynamics of complex media. He won the Excellence Award of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2014 and the Gordon Bell Prize in 2017. In 2018, he won the Fu Chengyi Young Scientist Award from the Geophysical Society.

The NSFC has established the Excellent Young Scientists Fund Project since 2012. It supports young scholars with achievements in basic research to conduct innovative research,, so as to supporting basic research, fostering talented researchers, developing international cooperation and promoting socioeconomic development.