Yao Chen received the Sunanda and Santimay Basu Early Career Award at the 2008 AGU Fall Meeting, held 17 December in San Francisco, Calif. The award recognizes an individual scientist from a developing nation for making outstanding contributions to research in Sun-Earth systems science that further the understanding of both plasma physical processes and their applications for the benefit of society.
Citation
Yao Chen, of Shandong University, has been awarded the 2008 Sunanda and Santimay Basu Early Career Award, given by the Space Physics and Aeronomy section of AGU. This award honors a young scientist from a developing nation for making outstanding contributions to research in Sun-Earth systems science that further the understanding of both plasma physical processes and their applications for the benefit of society. Chen has made significant contributions to the field of solar physics with a novel two-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) model for both the solar wind and coronal mass ejections (CMEs). Us-ing this model, he has studied the effect of Alfvén waves on the solar wind, the roles of the ideal MHD instability and magnetic reconnection in driving coronal flux rope ejecta for CMEs, and the effect of the background solar wind on the propagation of the flux rope ejecta. After studying at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Chen returned to China, earning his Ph.D. and working at the University of Science and Technology of China until 2006. In 2007, he took a faculty position at Shandong University, in China, where he currently plays an important role in developing the new Institute of Space Science. On behalf of the Space Physics and Aeronomy section, I am pleased to present Yao Chen with the 2008 Sunanda and Santimay Basu Early Career Award.
Response
I am deeply honored and humbled to be the first recipient of the Basu Early Career Award in Sun-Earth systems science.
I sincerely thank, from deep in my heart, Sunanda and Santimay for their generous bestowal and establishment of the award, and for their very kind consideration of the benefit of the scientific community in developing nations like China and India, especially young researchers in the early stage of their career. I thank my nominator, Xiaohua Deng, at Nanchang University, and the selection committee, chaired by Jonathan Makela. I also thank Chingsheng Wu and Youqiu Hu for supporting my nomination.
The honor is shared by every member of my group at Shandong University (SDU), where we are working together to build a new space physics program. Especially, I thank my colleague Lidong Xia, who moved from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) to our present affiliation together with me. So what we have accomplished at SDU is really a team effort that also involves our younger colleagues, like Quanqi Shi, Hongqiang Song, Shiwei Feng, Hui Fu, and our even younger students. The group is still expanding, taking advantage of the strong support from university authorities and the Chinese space physics community.
The honor is also shared by my thesis advisors, Ruth Esser, at University of Tromsø, and Youqiu Hu and Zhongyuan Li, at USTC, who have taught me how to do the science and be a part of the commu-nity. The honor is certainly shared by my lovely daughter and my wife, the other half of me.
—Yao Chen, Shandong University, Weihai, China