Dr Gao Meng, an Assistant Professor from Hong Kong Baptist University’s Department of Geography, has won the Atmospheric Sciences Division Outstanding Early Career Scientists Award 2020 from the European Geosciences Union (EGU) in recognition of his scientific achievements in the field of atmospheric sciences. Dr Gao is the only Chinese scholar to receive EGU’s Division Outstanding Early Career Scientists Award 2020.
EGU, a non-profit international union of scientists with about 20,000 members, is the leading organization for the earth, planetary and space science research in Europe, and it aims to foster fundamental geoscience research, alongside applied research that addresses key societal and environmental challenges.
The Division Outstanding Early Career Scientists Awards are presented annually by EGU. There are a total of 15 divisional awards, each with one award recipient. The awardees will receive their prizes at the EGU 2020 Assembly, which is to be held in Vienna in May 2020.
“The award is an encouragement for me in pursuing research into air pollution and climate change. The ultimate goal of my research is to find a solution to the haze problem, which has been my dream since high school,” said Dr Gao.
Before joining HKBU this summer, Dr Gao was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University. His research interests include atmospheric chemistry modeling, chemistry-climate interactions, climate change mitigation and environmental health. His research also focuses on the trends of haze events in mainland China and India, and the impact of climate change on these trends.
Some of Dr Gao’s research findings, including the development of a computer model for predicting Indian wintertime aerosol pollution and the discovery of the decrease in potential electricity production by windmills across India, was covered extensively by the media in India.
Dr Gao obtained his bachelor’s degree in Atmospheric Physics in 2012 and PhD in Chemical Engineering in 2015 from the Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology and the University of Iowa respectively. Since 2015, he has published some 40 co-authored papers in international academic journals, including Science Advances, Environmental International, Environmental Science & Technology, and Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, with 13 of them as the first author.