TWAS Opens Global Meeting in Oman

Oct 29, 2014     Email"> PrintText Size

The 25th General Meeting of the World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) opens on Sunday in Oman, with an agenda exploring cutting-edge science and recognizing some of the year’s top scientific accomplishments in the developing world.

BAI Chunli with winners of the 2014 TWAS Prizes (Image by CAS)

Some 350 scientists, policymakers, educators and others from 56 countries convene for the meeting from 26-29 October outside the nation’s capital in Muscat.

This year’s meeting focuses on how TWAS can help to build science and engineering by extending its networks to more women, younger scientists and countries that are not well-represented in the Academy.

“For TWAS, and for science generally, it is very important to build networks that are broader and more inclusive,” said TWAS President BAI Chunli, also President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. “The challenge is to support more women and more young scientists, and to expand to nations that are not well-represented in the global science community. This is a long-term goal, but we need to address the problem with urgency today.”

The TWAS General Meeting is a high point every year for science and engineering in the developing world. List of 46 newly elected fellows of the Academy is released at the meeting, with 11 scientists from Chinese mainland and eight of them CAS researchers.

19 scientists from China, India and Brazil win 11 separate prizes of the Academy, including the TWAS-Lenovo Science Prize, top prize of TWAS. Prof. XIE Yi from University of Science and Technology of China wins the Prize for Chemistry for her outstanding contribution in inorganic solid state chemistry at nanoscale, especially in inorganic functional solids with modulated electron and phonon structures. Prof. YUAN Yaxiang from the Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science was honored with the Prizes for Mathematics for his contribution to numerical methods for nonlinear optimization, particularly to nonlinear conjugate gradient methods, trust region algorithms, quasi-Newton methods and subspace methods.

Founded in 1983 by a distinguished group of scientists from the developing world, TWAS has some 1,150 elected Fellows from 90 countries; 15 of them are Nobel laureates. The Academy is based in Trieste, Italy. Through more than three decades, its mission has focused on supporting and promoting excellence in scientific research in the developing world and applying scientific and engineering research to address global challenges.