The National Science and Technology Award Conference was held in Beijing, Jan. 8, 2018. SUSTech Professor Hu Qing won the Second Grade of National Science and Technology Progress Award with her technical highlight of Risk Control Theories, Techniques and Applications of Heavy Metal Contamination in the Aquatic Environment of River Basin program.

The Conference is the most influential nationally occasion to honor professionals in science and technology who have made outstanding contributions to their own fields and to the modernization of China overall. General Secretary Xi Jinping and other Party and state leaders presented the Highest National Award of Science and Technology to the award winners.

The awardee, from the School of Environmental Science and Engineering at SUSTech, is the director of the Engineering Innovation Center (Beijing) at SUSTech, as well as a professor and party committee secretary of the School of Environmental Sciences and Engineering of SUSTech.

The breakthrough made by Professor Hu forms a complete technology and application system which helps the nation solve the technical difficulties in coupling contamination reduction and recycle use, in due consideration to both daily control and emergency response, and in the collaborative prevention and control of contamination source and process.

The program aims at the key bottleneck in one of the major national needs, the prevention and treatment of heavy metal contamination. After an 18-year long endeavor under the principle of “Source Control-Process Reduction-Integrated Management”, Hu Qing and her team proposed risk control theories, techniques, and applications of heavy metal contamination, studied and developed a series of key techniques and a complete set of equipment in green production, mine tailing treatment, removal promotion and in-situ passivation. This program achieved an innovative breakthrough in originality, creativity and practicability.

Spurred by China’s strategic needs for better environmental protection, SUSTech established the School of Environmental Science and Engineering in May 2015. The School’s faculty conducts cutting-edge research on water resources and water quality, soil science and remediation, air pollution control, industrial ecology, global environmental change and related areas.

One overall trend is that the School focuses on developing advanced technologies to meet urgent societal needs, such as novel waste-water treatment and desalination technologies, energy-saving and emission reduction technologies, and environmental remote sensing technologies.

The focus closely aligns with the developmental needs of China and indicates the inspiration for research here at SUSTech.

Source: School of Environmental Science and Engineering

Text: Xia Yingying/Deng Yutong(Intern)

Proofread by: Jeremy Welburn