On May 30, 2026, coinciding with the Tenth National Science and Technology Workers Day, the Fourth National Innovation Pioneer Award ceremony was held in Beijing. Academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Xiaofei CHEN, Chair of the Department of Earth and Space Sciences at Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech), as well as Mingjie ZHANG, Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Dean of the School of Life Sciences at SUSTech, were awarded the Fourth National Innovation Pioneer Award for Outstanding Individuals.

The “National Innovation Pioneer Award” is jointly established by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, the China Association for Science and Technology, the Ministry of Science and Technology, and the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council. It aims to recognize collectives and individuals who have made outstanding contributions in basic research and frontier exploration, major equipment and engineering challenges, achievement transformation and innovation entrepreneurship, social services, and other areas. This award is given once every three years. It is reported that there are a total of 12 award recipients from Guangdong Province this year, including three from Shenzhen, with our university accounting for two of them.

Academician Xiaofei CHEN is an internationally renowned theoretical and computational geophysicist and an Inaugural Fellow Capitalize the first letter of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG). He has long been dedicated to research in theoretical and computational geophysics, focusing on major national strategic needs in resource and energy security and earthquake prevention and disaster reduction. He has led his team to achieve a series of original results in key areas such as seismic wave numerical simulation, earthquake rupture mechanisms, and deep Earth imaging. The related achievements have been widely applied in deep exploration, resource prospecting, and engineering surveys, providing important scientific and technological support for the country’s earthquake prevention and disaster reduction efforts. In 2016, he joined SUSTech and led the establishment of the Department of Earth and Space Sciences. In 2017, the “Nonlinear Seismic Modeling” project he led won the Gordon Bell Prize, the highest award in the field of international supercomputing, highlighting China’s leading position in this field. He has published more than 300 academic papers as the first or corresponding author and has led more than 40 projects, including the National Natural Science Foundation of China’s Distinguished Young Scholars Fund, major projects, innovation groups, and key projects. He has received honors such as the Ho Leung Ho Lee Prize for Scientific and Technological Progress, the National Advanced Individual in Earthquake Science and Technology, and the first prize of the 9th “Overseas Chinese Contribution Award.”

Academician Mingjie ZHANG is a world-renowned top neuroscientist. He has long been committed to the establishment and maintenance of neuronal polarity and to the structural and functional analysis of key proteins related to neural signal transduction. He has published over 240 high-quality papers as first or corresponding author in international academic journals, with a total citation count exceeding 14,000. He has led his team to achieve several breakthrough advances: systematically analyzing the PDZ and GK domain scaffolding proteins in the postsynaptic density and elucidating the molecular mechanisms of neural signal transduction networks; revealing how phase separation regulates the assembly of core postsynaptic density proteins and elucidating its intrinsic link to synaptic plasticity; confirming that scaffold protein liquid-liquid phase separation is a core mechanism for the formation of presynaptic active zones. He was twice awarded the Hong Kong Croucher Foundation Senior Researcher Award in 2003 and 2017, won the Second Prize of the National Natural Science Award in 2006, received the Ho Leung Ho Lee Prize for Scientific and Technological Progress in 2011, and was awarded the Tan Jiazhen Life Science Achievement Award in 2021, among others.