Award Committee
The CUSPEA Foundation will invite renowned domestic and foreign scientists who are enthusiastic about promoting international exchanges and cooperation to form the "CUSPEA PRIZE" award committee. The appointment period of each judge is three years. Judges are required to make full disclosure of their relationship with the nominee, and if the nominee is related to a member of the jury, such as relatives or students, the judge must refrain from relevant jury discussion and voting.
Member of the first (2021-2023) Award Committee:
Chairman of the committee: Prof. Anthony J. Leggett
Sir Anthony J. Leggett, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Physics, has been a faculty member at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign since 1983. He is widely recognized as a world leader in the theory of low-temperature physics. His pioneering work on super-fluidity was recognized by the 2003 Nobel Prize in Physics.
He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Russian Academy of Sciences (foreign member). He is a fellow of the Royal Society (U.K.), and an honorary fellow of the Institute of Physics of U.K. He was knighted (KBE) by Queen Elizabeth II in 2004 "for services to physics."
Sir Leggett has helped Dr. Tsung-Dao Lee in establishing the CUSPEA program in the United States. His university has accepted 18 CUSPEA students. He has tutored three CUSPEA doctoral students and supervised many CUSPEA postdoctoral scholars.
Prof. Peter Dayan
Peter Dayan read Mathematics at Cambridge, studied for his PhD with David Willshaw in Edinburgh, and did postdocs with Terry Sejnowski at the Salk Institute and Geoff Hinton in Toronto. He was an assistant professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and was a founding faculty member of the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at UCL, which he then ran for 15 years. He is currently a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics and an Alexander von Humboldt Professor at the University of Tübingen. His interests include affective decision making and neural reinforcement learning. He was awarded the Rumelhart Prize for Contributions to the Theoretical Foundations of Human Cognition in 2012, shared the Brain Prize in 2017, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 2018 and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2019.
Prof. Liu Ming
Dr. Ming Liu is a member of Chinese Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of The World Academy of Sciences and IEEE. She is Professor of Fudan University，and the director of Frontier Institute of Chip and System, Fudan University. She is also Director of academic Committee of Institute of Microelectronics, CAS.
Dr. Liu has long been committed to research in the field of microelectronics science and technology, and has made systematic and creative contributions in emerging memory. Her research interests are non-volatile memory, new type computing.
Prof. Chao Tang (CUSPEA 1980)
Dr. Chao Tang is a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He is Peking University Chair Professor of Physics and Systems Biology, Executive Dean of the Academy for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, and Director of the Center for Quantitative Biology, Peking University. He is also Director of the South Bay Interdisciplinary Science Center and President of CUSPEA Scholars Association.
Dr. Tang has carried out many pioneering works in the fields of statistical physics, condensed matter physics, complex systems, nonlinear science, and biological physics. His current research is at the interface between physics and biology, in particular in quantitative systems biology and biological physics, exploring quantitative laws and design principles in living systems. Dr. Tang is the founding co-editor-in-chief of Quantitative Biology.
Prof. Zhonglin Wang (CUSPEA 1982)
Dr. Zhonglin Wang is the Director of the CUSPEA Institute of Technology, the Director of the Beijing Institute of Nanoenergy and Nanosystems, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and former Regents' Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Wang is the winner of the 2019 Albert Einstein World Award of Science, the 2018 ENI award in Energy Frontiers, the 2015 Thomson-Reuters Citation Laureate in Physics. He is also the winner of the 2014 James C. McGroddy New Materials Award of the American Physical Society, and the 2011 MRS Medal of the American Society for Materials. Dr. Wang is a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Canadian Royal Academy of Engineering and Academia Europaea. He is the editor-in-chief of Nano Energy.
Dr. Wang is the founder of the field of nanoenergy research. He has invented the piezoelectric nanogenerator and triboelectric nanogenerator, coined the concepts of self-driven system and blue energy. Wang has pioneered the two disciplines of Piezotronics and Piezophototronics. His original discoveries have led to the research of third-generation semiconductor nanomaterials, making zinc oxide nanostructures as important as carbon nanotubes and silicon nanowires. According to Google Scholar, Dr. Wang's papers have been cited over 260,000 times, and the H-index is 250, currently ranking the first in the world in materials science field.
Prof. Xincheng Xie (CUSPEA 1981)
Dr. Xincheng Xie is a member of Chinese Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the World Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of American Physical Society. He is the Vice President of the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and Chair Professor of Peking University. He has received the Achievements of Outstanding Science and Technology China Academy Award (2011), the Top Ten Advances in Chinese Science (2010).
Dr. Xie has been engaged in theoretical research of condensed matter physics for a long time. His main research areas include quantum Hall effect, spintronics, and low-dimensional quantum systems. He is currently the editor-in-chief of Science in China: Physics, Mechanics, Astronomy, among other important international academic journals.
Prof. Nieng Yan
Prof. Nieng Yan is a foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences, United States. She is a structural biologist and the Shirley M. Tilghman Professor of Molecular Biology at Princeton University.
Dr. Yan seeks to unveil the governing principles of membrane transport, a fundamental physiological process that maintains cellular homeostasis, converts different energy forms, and generates and transduces signals. Her research combines X-ray crystallography, single-particle cryo-EM, and multiple biophysical and biochemical methods to investigate the structures and mechanism of membrane transport proteins exemplified by glucose transporters and voltage-gated sodium and calcium channels. Her scientific accomplishments have won her a number of international accolades. Dr. Yan was an HHMI international early career scientist in 2012-2017, the recipient of the 2015 Protein Society Young Investigator Award, the 2015 Beverley & Raymond Sackler International Prize in Biophysics, the Alexander M. Cruickshank lecturer at the GRC on membrane transport proteins in 2016, the 2019 Weizmann Women & Science Award, and the 2021 Anatrace Membrane Protein Award by the Biophysical Society.
Award Committee Supervisor
The CUSPEA Foundation will invite a well-known scholar, who will possess a proven track record as an evaluation expert to take the role of Award Committee Supervisor. The Supervisor will participate in the award discussion and verify the validity of the vote to ensure its fairness, justice and compliance. The Supervisor has no voting rights.
