Visiting Assistant Professor Zhou Xinan in SPST is awarded the 2023 ICTP Prize, a prestigious international prize from the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP). Established in 1964 by Nobel Laureate Abdus Salam in Trieste Italy, ICTP is a renowned international scientific hub and a UNESCO-affiliated organization that is committed to promoting science in the underdeveloped world. The ICTP Prize was established in 1982, and is annually awarded to outstanding young researchers from developing countries, recognizing the originality and importance of their contributions to physics. The 2023 ICTP Prize is awarded to Prof. Zhou “for novel and outstanding contributions leading to new techniques to compute correlation functions in conformal field theories in the context of the AdS/CFT correspondence, and for developing new approaches to the analytic conformal bootstrap”. This made him the 8th researcher from China to receive this international recognition. It is also the first time that the ICTP Prize is awarded to a Chinese researcher in the area of theoretical high energy physics.
Prof. Zhou Xinan joined ShanghaiTech in the summer of 2023, and he is one of the first members of the newly founded Fundamental Theory Group in SPST. He completed his undergraduate studies in 2013 at the University of Science and Technology of China and obtained his PhD at Stony Brook University in 2018. He worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University for three years before returning to China as an Assistant Professor in Kavli Institute for Theoretical Sciences (KITS) at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS) in 2021. At ShanghaiTech, Prof. Zhou plays an active role in the development of the Fundamental Theory Group including the recruitment affairs and the organization of scientific events. In August 2023, he organized a joint international summer school in theoretical high energy physics between ShanghaiTech and KITS. The event attracted significant attention in the community and was very well received by the students.