On 4 December 2020, The World Academy of Science (TWAS) announced the winners of the TWAS Awards. This year, there are 13 award winners. Chair Professor Junguo LIU from the School of Environmental Sciences and Engineering at SUSTech, received the award for his fundamental contribution to policy relevant studies on water resources, climate change mitigation, and environmental management in China and other developing countries.

Prof. LIU is the first recipient of Outstanding Young Scientist Award from the National Natural Science Foundation in China in SUSTech and was elected Member of Academia Europaea in 2020. He has earned an excellent international reputation for his contributions to the fields of water resources research and ecological restoration, with about 180 papers published in world-known journals, such as Science, Nature, PNAS, Nature Climate Change, Nature Communications, Nature Sustainability, and Science Advances. He has established the Bureau of the Beijing Ecological Restoration and Environmental Protection Consortium and became its first chairman.

TWAS was founded in 1983 by a distinguished group of scientists from the developing world, under the leadership of Abdus Salam, the Pakistani physicist and Nobel laureate. They shared a belief that developing nations, by building strength in science and engineering, could build the knowledge and skill to address such challenges as hunger, disease, and poverty. TWAS was given to talents who make an outstanding contribution in nine fileds of sciences.