Award winners and representatives attend the meeting for Shanghai Science and Technology Awards. (Chen Zhengbao)
Shanghai Science and Technology Awards — the city's highest awards for science and technology achievements — were handed to 265 projects and individuals yesterday.
For the first time, there were two winners of the top award, one involving a material developed for China's super laser facility, the other a new BeiDou location technology.
Hu Lili, director of the R&D Center of High Power Laser Optical Components of the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, won the top prize for developing technologies for mass production of a large-size phosphate laser glass that can amplify the energy of a laser.
Hu and his team spent 12 years developing key technologies for the full flow of mass production for "Nd-doped" phosphate glass, including continuous melting, fine annealing, cladding of the laser glass and high-accuracy testing.
The second top award winner is Yu Wenxian, professor of School of Electronic Information and Electrical Engineering of Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
He and his team have made a series of breakthroughs on location applications to produce a satellite navigation system to make tracking more accurate.
The technology developed has helped to create China's largest indoor map database, which is used by Internet companies including Tencent and the country's largest map service provider Amap.
"Most indoor map models still rely on manual data collection, which is of rather low efficiency," Yu said. "However, the demand for indoor maps is increasing, which requires making and updating the maps faster."
The international cooperation awards went to Michail Vladimirovich Ivanov from Russia and Jun Chen from the United States.
Zhang Jianhua, 45, from Shanghai University, is one of the 10 laureates of the Youth with Outstanding Science and Technology Contribution.
Cooperating with two local companies, her project on a manufacturing technique and application of the latest high resolution display technology also won the first prize of the Science and Technology Progress Awards.
The project has resolved several bottlenecks with the development of "AM OLED," a display technology used in devices including mobile phones and laptops.
"The companies need time to scale up the production and make it available for the public, while the researchers must go one step forward on the most frontier technology so that they can serve the industry at the best time," Zhang said.
Health and environmental protection projects were among the leading awards.
A physical therapy for patients with terminal pancreatic cancer through artery injection of chemo-medicine developed by Dr Li Maoquan from Shanghai No.10 People's Hospital has benefited more than 5,000 patients.
"The therapy has prolonged patients' survival period from 6.7 months to 13.8 months and improved their life quality," Li said.
