Nine Asians Awarded 2014 TWAS Prizes

Scientists from China, Taiwan, India and Malaysia have been recognized for their work with the 2014 TWAS Prizes.

AsianScientist (Nov. 7, 2014) – The 11 winners of the World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) 2014 prizes were announced at the Academy’s 25th General Meeting held on October 26 in Muscat, Oman. Each TWAS Prize carries a cash award of US$15,000. The winners will lecture about their research at TWAS’s 26th General Meeting in 2015, where they will also receive a plaque and the prize money.

In the field of agricultural sciences, Professor Zhang Fusuo from the China Agricultural University was recognized for his role in establishing the principle and technology of integrated nutrient management in China that has helped enhance food production and nutrient use efficiency while reducing environmental damages nationwide.

Professor Xie Yi the University of Science and Technology, China, was awarded the 2014 TWAS Prize in Chemistry for her outstanding contribution in inorganic solid state chemistry at nanoscale, especially in inorganic functional solids with modulated electron and phonon structures.

National Taiwan University’s Professor Chung Sun-Lin won the 2014 TWAS Prize in Earth Sciences for his contribution to our understanding of continental tectonics and magma generation based on his studies from the roof of the world and neighboring regions.

The 2014 TWAS Prize in engineering was shared by Dr. Viswanathan Kumaran from the Indian Institute of Science and Dr. Lu Chih-Yuan from Taiwan’s Macronix International, for their work on the laminar-turbulent transition of flow through soft-walled tubes and channels and outstanding technical contributions in semiconductor device physics and semiconductor integrated circuits technology, respectively.

Similarly, Professor Irene Ng Oi Lin from the University of Hong Kong and Professor Chang Tse Wen from Academia Sinica’s Genomics Research Center shared the 2014 TWAS Prize in Medical Sciences, for their contributions to our understanding of liver cancer and the development of asthma treatments, respectively.

Professor Yuan Yaxiang from the Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences was honored with the 2014 TWAS Prize in Mathematics for his contribution to numerical methods for nonlinear optimization, particularly to nonlinear conjugate gradient methods, trust region algorithms, quasi-Newton methods and subspace methods.

University of Malaya’s Professor Rajah Rasiah was awareded the TWAS-Celso Furtado Prize in Social Sciences for his pioneering contribution to the concept and methodology of technological capabilities and establishing its relationship with economic development.

Other prize winners include Marcelo Rubinstein and Daniel de Florian from Argentina, who won the 2014 TWAS Prizes in biology and physics respectively.

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Source: The World Academy of Sciences.
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