Wang Jingli

wangjingli0715@163.com

AN awarding ceremony was held online and offline in Shenzhen on Saturday to honor the 100 Xplorer Prize winners in 2021 and 2022.

Each winner will receive a total of 3 million yuan (US$420,000) over the next five years to support their research.

The prize, a nongovernmental award, was initiated in 2018 by Tencent Foundation founder Pony Ma together with 14 renowned scientists including Chen Ning Yang.

Wang Guangyu, a 31-year-old researcher from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, is this year’s youngest winner. She is also the prize’s first winner who was born after 1990.

In 2021, a total of eight female scientists won the prize, while this year, another four female scientists won the award. Currently, a total of 21 female scientists have won the prize, according to Tencent Foundation.

For the first time this year, the Xplorer Prize honored five scientists in the medical science field. The prize now covers 10 categories related to basic science and frontier technologies.

The winners of this year’s Xplorer Prize come from 35 institutions in 18 cities and regions, with some such as Dalian and the Macao Special Administrative Region producing their first winner ever. The prize’s goal is to encourage scientists under 45 to pursue their work, and it has funded 200 promising young scientists since its launch.

Mak Pui-in, a professor from the University of Macao pursuing chip research, said that Macao’s science research has achieved rapid growth in recent years thanks to support from the State as well as interactions with the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.

Over 20 winners of international prizes such as Nobel Prize and Turing Award participated in the nomination process.