Recently, winners of the 16th Guangdong Ding Ying Science and Technology Award (the Ding Ying Award for short) were announced by the Guangdong Provincial Association for Science and Technology. Among them, two come from Southern Medical University (SMU), i.e. Professor Ma Jianhua and Professor Sun Jian.
Notably, the Award was initially approved by the Guangdong Provincial Government in 1989, and was named after Ding Ying (1888-1964), a venerated scientist and academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences who had dedicated himself wholeheartedly to the cause of science and the well-being of the people. To commemorate Ding for his noble spirit and remarkable achievements and to inspire more to follow, the Ding Ying Award was specially established and aimed to reward outstanding young scientists and technicians from Guangdong Province for their prominent contributions in academic research, technological progress and/or socioeconomic development.
As for this year’s Ding Ying Award, 30 scientists and technologists stood out as the final winners out of 125 valid candidates nominated by provincial academic societies and academies, local associations for science and technology, universities, research institutes, enterprises, etc. The award process was transparent and rigorous, including the preliminary evaluation by a qualification-reviewing team, the re-evaluation by an expert committee, and the final voting by a jury.
Profiles of the Two Winners
Professor Ma Jianhua is mainly engaged in the research of CT imaging methods and techniques with high-end medical X-ray. His recent research focuses on addressing “how to achieve CT precision imaging with low-dose X-ray”, an important scientific problem crossing medicine science and information science. Notably, he has made some systematic innovations in CT data acquisition and modeling, image reconstruction, functional CT perfusion imaging, spectral CT quantitative imaging, and the development of software systems of high-end CT low-dose imaging, etc. He is also a first prize winner of 2019 Guangdong Technological Invention Award (first contributor), and a second prize winner of 2015 Guangdong Science and Technology Award (second contributor).
He concurrently serves as Director of the Guangdong Engineering and Technical Research Center for Medical Radiography Systems, Director of the Guangzhou Key Laboratory of Medical Radiography and Testing Technology, Deputy Chairman of the Youth Working Committee of the Chinese Society of Biomedical Engineering, and Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the top medical imaging journal IEEE Trans. Med. Imaging, and Chief Scientist of the CT Product R&D Center of Neusoft Medical Systems Co., Ltd.
Professor Sun Jian works mainly on the basic and clinical research of chronic liver disease. He has made some innovative contributions in optimizing antiviral treatments for hepatitis B by conducting multi-center and randomized controlled clinical studies in combination with molecular virological and immunological studies. In 2017, he was named as a distinguished professor of the “Guangdong Zhujiang Scholars Program” and sponsored by the “Guangdong Outstanding Young Medical Talents Program”. In 2018, he won the Wu Mengchao Medical Youth Fund Award. Besides, so far He has won a second prize of the National Science and Technology Progress Award, three first prizes of the Guangdong Science and Technology Progress Award, and two second prizes of the Chinese Medical Science and Technology Award. In 2021, he was named as a distinguished professor of the national “Chang Jiang Scholars Program”.
