On January 9, the CPC Central Committee and the State Council held the 2016 National Science and Technology Award Conference in Beijing. Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the CPC Central Committee, Chinese President and Chairman of the Central Military Commission, as well as other Party and state leaders attended the conference and presented awards to the winners. “Self-adaptive and High-precision Numerical Method and Its Theoretical Analysis”, a project led by Tang Tao, Vice President of the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) and a chair professor at the Department of Mathematics, SUSTech, won the Second Prize of the National Natural Science Award.
Tang is a world-renowned computational mathematics scholar doing systematic and original research in some important fields of scientific computing. His research findings won the Leslie Fox Prize from the Institute of Mathematics and Its Applications, the Feng Kang Scientific Computing Award from the Computational Mathematics Branch of the Chinese Mathematical Society, and won the First Prize of the Award for College and University Natural Sciences from the Ministry of Education. His research findings were highly recognized by international peers. In 2012, he was selected as a fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), the most influential industrial and applied mathematics organization in the world. In 2017, he was selected as a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
Two grand prize winners, 279 projects, five foreign experts and one international organization were selected for the 2016 National Science and Technology Award. The two grand prize winners were academician Zhao Zhongxian from the Institute of Physics CAS and researcher Tu Youyou from the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences. The 279 projects include 42 projects winning the National Natural Science Award (one winning the first prize and 41 winning the second prize); 66 projects winning the National Technology Invention Award (three winning the first prize and 63 winning the second prize), as well as 171 projects winning the National S&T Progress Award (two winning the grand prize, 20 (three innovation teams) winning the first prize and 149 winning the second prize). Besides, five foreign experts and one international organization won the China International Science and Technology Cooperation Award.
Tang is the first winner of the National Natural Science Award working at SUSTech. With the joining of more outstanding scholars, SUSTech, a young university, will achieve more national research findings.
In 2016, SUSTech made remarkable achievements in research, steadily improved in the number of declared projects, the number of approved projects and subsidy amount, and achieved major breakthroughs in talent projects, key fund projects and other projects. Throughout the year, 52 NSFC projects of SUSTech were initiated, including one project subsidized by the “National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars”, two projects subsidized by the “Excellent Young Scientists Fund” and two key fund projects, with a total subsidy amount of nearly 30 million yuan; 12 projects of SUSTech were approved as projects of the Ministry of Science and Technology, including six key R&D projects (project undertaker) with a total subsidy amount of over 32 million yuan.
