On October 31st, Alibaba Damo Academy announced the winners of the 5th Young Fellow Award. Assistant Professor Tong Dan of the Department of Earth System Science (DESS), Tsinghua University won the award.

The Alibaba Damo Academy Young Fellow is an unofficial, non-profit public service award established by Alibaba Group in 2018, organized by Alibaba Damo Academy and supported by the Alibaba Foundation, for young Chinese scholars who have made a key contribution to the advancement of science and technology. The Award aims to identify and support outstanding young scholars in China who are fully engaged in scientific research in academic and research institutions and have the potential to achieve outstanding results in the future and become the backbone of scientific research in China. Over the past four years, the Damo Academy Young Fellow Award has supported nearly 40 outstanding young scholars.

Tong Dan joined the Department of Earth System Science of Tsinghua University as an assistant professor in 2021. She has made a series of original achievements with international influence in three aspects: modeling complex nonlinear response between socio-economic activities and air pollution, accounting method system of global key industries based on big data, and exploration of collaborative governance path between global and regional climate change and air pollution by means of innovative methods such as multi-disciplinary model system construction and big data fusion basic database construction. She has won the award because she has built a cross-coupling model of energy-economy-emission-collaborative governance, providing a theoretical foundation for the policy of reducing pollution and carbon emissions.

This year, the Young Fellow Award covers a wide range of fields of science and technology, drawing more social attention. Through application, recommendation by others, and active search, the 2022 Young Fellow Award received nearly 500 valid applications from 135 institutes of higher education across the country. These participating young scholars present enormous academic potential and have been recommended by nearly 200 academicians, 19 university presidents, and 2 Nobel Prize laureates.

Written by Wang Jiayin