PROF JIDONG ZHAO AWARDED MINISTRY OF EDUCATION CHANG JIANG SCHOLARS CHAIR PROFESSORSHIP AND NATURAL SCIENCE AWARD
Prof. ZHAO Jidong, Professor of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering has been named a Chang Jiang Scholars Chair Professor (教育部長江學者獎勵計劃講座教授) for 2021–2024 by the Chinese Ministry of Education. He has also received a prestigious first-class award in Natural Science from Chinese Ministry of Education in the 2021 MOE’s Higher Education Outstanding Scientific Research Output Award (Science and Technology). These awards commend him for a stellar career with countless distinguished research contributions and achievements.
A computational geomechanics expert, Prof. Zhao joined the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in 2008. He is editor/co-editor/associate-editor of numerous top-tier academic journals including Computers and Geotechnics (Elsevier), Granular Matter (Springer), and Journal of Engineering Mechanics (ASCE). He also serves on the editorial boards for the International Journal for Numerical and Analytical Methods in Geomechanics (Wiley), Acta Geotechnica (Springer) and Science Progress (SAGE). Prof. Zhao is a grant assessor for a number of (inter)national grant-giving bodies, including the Australian Research Council (ARC), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada, the European Research Council (ERC), Poland’s National Science Centre (NCN), the Chilean National Science and Technology Commission (CONICYT) and the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong (RGC/HK). He continues to be very active in the academic community, previously serving as Secretary for the International Society for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering (ISSMGE)’s TC103 Numerical Methods in Geomechanics, and is now a core committee member of ISSMGE’s TC105 Micromechanics, as well as the Engineering Mechanics Institute (EMI)’s Granular Materials Committee.
Throughout his career Prof. Zhao has won numerous awards: including an Excellent PhD Thesis award from Tsinghua University (2002), a University of Newcastle (Australia) Research Fellowship Award (2007), a 2018 Computers and Geotechnics Outstanding Paper Award, Granular Matter’s Top 5 Cited Articles award (2018), and a 2019 Scott Sloan Best Paper Award. In 2021, Prof. Zhao (with former PhD student Zhiwei Gao and collaborators from Beihang University) received from the Chinese Ministry of Education a prestigious First-class Award in Natural Science, in MOE’s Higher Education Outstanding Scientific Research Output Award (Science and Technology).
The Chang Jiang Scholars Program is one of the highest academic awards given to individuals in the higher education sector by the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China. With his long record of outstanding, internationally-recognized accomplishments, Prof. Zhao thoroughly deserves this honor of the highest order. Congratulations!
