The list of 100 Young Global Leaders for 2017 was released by the World Economic Forum on Wednesday. Liu Zihong, founder of a Shenzhen-based technology company called Royole, secured a spot on the list, the Shenzhen Economic Daily reported yesterday.

    Each year, the World Economic Forum scours the world to select 100 people under the age of 40, who have accomplished remarkable things in their field and are ready to tackle the world’s most complex and pressing challenges as Young Global Leaders.

    Among the 100 awardees this year, nine of them are from China, including Liu from Shenzhen.

    Born in 1983, Liu received his doctorate in electronic engineering at Stanford University when he was 26. He founded Royole, a company engaged in developing and manufacturing flexible displays, flexible sensors and smart devices, in 2012, after he worked at IBM’s R&D department in New York for three years.

    Currently, Liu’s company is valued at above 3 billion dollars after five rounds of financing.

    Other Chinese that were recognized as Young Global Leaders this year include two of the world’s top scientists in genome editing: Yang Luhan, chief scientist at eGenesis Biosciences, and Zhang Feng, a core member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

    They co-invented the revolutionary CRISPR-Cas9 genome-editing tool, described by WIRED as “the gene-editing technique that could help eradicate health conditions and bring back the woolly mammoth.” The invention was named Science Magazine’s Breakthrough of the Year in 2015.

    Among this year’s 100 awardees, 54 percent of them are women and over 50 percent come from emerging economies, reflecting a trend towards greater diversity in global leadership, according to the report.

    “When selecting Young Global Leaders, we would consider if candidates have made any breakthroughs in their professional fields and if they have problem-solving and cross-boundary cooperating abilities to tackle social and economic problems across the globe in creative ways,” said John Dutton, head of the Young Global Leaders community.

    (Zhang Yang)