AsianScientist (Mar. 17, 2016) – Professor Zhao Guochun of the Department of Earth Sciences, the University of Hong Kong (HKU), has been selected as one of the laureates for the 29th Khwarizmi International Award. Although this award has been presented to many outstanding scientists since it was established in 1987, it is for the first time to be presented to a geologist.
The Khwarizmi International Award was named in memory of the achievements of Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi, a Persian mathematician, astronomer and geographer. The Award seeks to recognize the efforts made by researchers, innovators and inventors from all over the world and to appreciate their invaluable achievements and contributions to various fields of science and technology.
The Khwarizmi International Award is awarded on annual basis. A total of nine outstanding scholars were selected as the 29th KIA Laureates (Foreign Section), including those from the US, Sweden, Japan, Germany, Australia and Mexico.
Winning Zhao the award was his work which led to two original and important scientific achievements. The first was the first recognition of global-scale 2.0-1.8 billion year-old collisional events that assembled nearly all the continents on Earth to form a single supercontinent.
The second was the discovery of two 1.95-1.85 billion year-old Himalaya-type collisional belts, called the Khondalite Belt and Trans-North China Orogen, in northern China.
“I’m deeply honored to have received this award, which is a reflection of scientific achievements made by my research group, not only by myself,” said Zhao.
Zhao is also one of the nine HKU academics named amongst the “Highly Cited Researchers 2015” by Thomson Reuters. Zhao is the editor-in-chief of Precambrian Research, and he won the State Natural Science Award (Second Class) in 2014. In the same year, he was elected to be the Fellow of the Geological Society of America and the President of the International Association of Gondwana Research.
The article can be found at: Zhao et al. (2003) A Paleo-Mesoproterozoic Supercontinent and its Record in North China.
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Source: Hong Kong University.
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