Recently, Chang Xiaoxia, a PhD student from the School of Chemical Engineering and Technology received the Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) ‘SciFinder Future Leaders’ Award of 2017. Chang is the first TJU student who has ever received the prize and one of only two students from Chinese mainland who won the prize this year.

The 2017 ‘SciFinder Future Leaders’ program has attracted more than four hundred students from around the world, and only 25 students have been awarded this title through the rigorous selection and  intense competition processes. Chang Xiaoxia from TJU presented an oral report at the ACS annual meeting. Chang is currently a PhD candidate under the supervision of Professor Gong Jinlong at TJU. His research focuses on fuel production by solar water splitting and photocatalytic CO2 reduction, particularly the investigation of reaction mechanisms and pathways. With fifteen papers published by now, he is the first author of some papers published in famous international journals such as J. Am. Chem. Soc., Angew Chem. Int. Ed., Energy Environ. Sci. Chang received a National Scholarship for Graduate Students and a TJU Excellent Doctoral Thesis Award during his doctoral program.

CAS is a division of the American Chemical Society (ACS), dedicated to the vision of improving people's lives through the transforming power of chemistry. The CAS SciFinder Future Leaders program selects PhD students and postdocs who ‘best demonstrate academic accomplishment, a commitment to research and an appreciation of research information’. The awardees will attend the 254th ACS National Meeting & Exposition in Washington, DC.

 Editors: Yin Shiyu and Ross Colquhoun