On the afternoon of June 25, the award ceremony for the 2024 Tan Kah Kee Science Awards (TKK Science Awards) and Tan Kah Kee Young Scientist Awards (TKK Young Scientist Awards) was held at the 21st Academician Conference of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Following the procedures including correspondence evaluation, preliminary evaluation by various academic award committees, and final evaluation by the general award committee, Professor Zhao Zhisheng from YSU’s State Key Laboratory of Metastable Materials Science and Technology was awarded the TKK Young Scientist Awards. This is the first time YSU has won the TKK Young Scientist Awards since it received the TKK Science Awards in 2018, marking a significant historical breakthrough for Hebei province. This year, a total of 5 projects nationwide received the TKK Science Awards, and 10 young scientists were awarded the TKK Young Scientist Awards.
The award ceremony (first from the right: Zhao Zhisheng, winner of the TKK Young Scientist Awards)
Hou Jianguo, President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Chairman of the General Award Committee of the TKK Science Awards, presents the award to Zhao Zhisheng.
The title of Professor Zhao Zhisheng’s award-winning achievement is the creation of new carbon materials. The search for new carbon materials has always been a frontier scientific topic in the field of materials. Zhao Zhisheng and his collaborators have revealed the phase transition mechanism of carbon materials such as graphite, glassy carbon, and fullerene under high temperature and high pressure, established a roadmap for creating new carbon materials through high-pressure phase transitions, and synthesized a series of new carbon materials with unique combinations of properties, including super hard and highly tough graphite-diamond hybrid carbon with adjustable conductivity, conductive lightweight and high-strength compressed glassy carbon, the hardest amorphous carbon, and conductive super hard amorphous carbon/nano-diamond composites, adding new members to the carbon material family. The coherent interface structure between graphite and diamond was experimentally confirmed, and a new type of solid-state phase transition based on the formation and expansion of basic elements was discovered, solving the scientific puzzle of direct phase transition mechanism from graphite to diamond that has plagued the scientific community for more than half a century. This new solid-state phase transition mechanism is more universal to the classical nucleation growth and synergistic shear mechanism. Furthermore, by controlling the process of graphite-to-diamond phase transition, graphite-diamond hybrid carbon was created and named Gradia. Gradia combines the property advantages of graphite and diamond, possessing ultra-high strength, hardness, toughness, excellent self-lubrication, and adjustable conductivity. The material can precisely control its properties by changing the ratio of graphite to diamond, making it a new generation of high-performance carbon material capable of achieving excellent property combinations of conductivity/super hardness, extreme toughness/extreme hardness, and self-lubrication/super hardness. It can be widely used in the fields of mechanical processing, high-end equipment and aerospace as a high-end cutting tool material, mold material, and self-lubricating bearing material.
The TKK Science Awards grew out of the former Tan Kah Kee Awards, which was established in 1988 and named after Mr. Tan Kah Kee, a well-known patriotic overseas Chinese leader. In 2003, with the approval of the State Council, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Bank of China jointly established the Tan Kah Kee Science Award Foundation (TKK Science Award Foundation) and set up the TKK Science Awards to reward major original scientific and technological achievements made in China in the latest times. The TKK Young Scientist Awards was set up in 2010 to award young scientific and technological talents who have independently made significant original scientific and technological achievements in China. By 2024, the TKK Science Award Foundation has organized 7 rounds of recommendations and evaluations for the TKK Young Scientist Awards, with a total of 42 young scientific and technological talents winning the award.
Zhao Zhisheng at work
At the award ceremony, Hou Jianguo, President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Chairman of the General Award Committee of the TKK Young Scientist Awards, presented the awards to the winning scientists. Lin Jingzhen, Vice President of the Bank of China, introduced the evaluation process and announced the list of winners. Chang Jin, Vice President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Chairman of the TKK Science Award Foundation, presided over the award ceremony. Wang Keqiang, Vice President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Vice Chairman of the TKK Science Award Foundation, attended the ceremony. All members of the Presidium of the Academy and all academicians present at the Academician Conference attended the ceremony.
