Two scientists win China's top science award for 2023

Chinese geo-spatial information expert Li Deren and condensed matter physics physicist Xue Qikun were awarded the State Preeminent Science and Technology Award, China's top science honor, on Monday.

They received the prize for their outstanding contributions to scientific and technological innovation during the National Science and Technology Award Conference in Beijing. 

Li Deren, born in December 1939, is an academician at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the Chinese Academy of Engineering and the International Eurasian Academy of Sciences (IEAS) as well as a corresponding academician at the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) and honorary member of the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS).

He is a world-renowned expert on geo-spatial information, with great achievements in theoretical, integrated and coordinated innovation of geo-spatial information, significantly contributing to making China one of the top three countries or regions in the world in this field.

As a renowned photogrammetry and remote sensing expert, Li Deren has dedicated his career to propelling China to the forefront of Earth observation technology. Recognized for his mastery of high-precision global positioning and satellite remote sensing, he has made groundbreaking contributions.

He tackled the challenge of high-precision processing for remote sensing satellite images. Under his leadership, his team developed a fully automated, high-precision airborne and ground measurement system. These achievements have significantly advanced China's high-precision and high-resolution Earth observation system.

Li, also a professor at Wuhan University and a PhD supervisor, is the director of the Academic Committee of Wuhan University, the director of the Academic Committee of the State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, and the director of the Collaborative Innovation Center of Geospatial Technology.

He has won one National Science and Technology Progress Award (Innovation team), four Second Class of National Science and Technology Progress Awards and two National Higher Education Teaching Achievement Prizes. He has published 10 monographs and edited eight paper collections, along with 470 published journal papers including 183 as the first author, and 270 conference papers, including 119 as the first author.

Xue Qikun, born in December 1962, is a renowned Chinese physicist who received the Buckley Prize for his groundbreaking research on topological insulators and the quantum anomalous Hall effect. 

He and his team were the first to experimentally observe the quantum anomalous Hall effect in 2012, and they published their findings in the journal Science in 2013. The journal's reviewer described the findings as "a landmark work in condensed matter physics." Yang Zhenning, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, called it "the first physics paper of Nobel Prize level published by a Chinese lab."

His team also discovered interface-enhanced high-temperature superconductivity in the heterostructure system, which opened up a new direction of research in the field of high-temperature superconductivity.

After growing up in a mountainous area in east China's Shandong Province, Xue obtained a master's degree and a doctorate in condensed matter physics from the Institute of Physics under the CAS, and became an academician at Tsinghua University. 

During his time at Tsinghua University, Xue earned the nickname "7-11 professor" due to his daily routine, which involved entering the laboratory at 7 a.m. and leaving at 11 p.m. He maintained this dedicated work schedule for many years, and almost never took a weekend off.

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