On April 15, 2022, the Provincial Science and Technology Innovation Conference was held in Guangzhou and at this event the winners of the 2021 Guangdong Science and Technology Awards were announced. Jinan University received 9 awards, including 2 first prizes, 6 second prizes and 1 Science and Technology Cooperation Award. As one of the four winners in the province, Martin Banwell, from our institute, received the Science and Technology Cooperation Award.

    In 2014, Academician Martin Banwell paid his first visit to Guangzhou and thereafter began to work regularly in Guangdong. Between 2016 to 2019 he was the Pearl River Visiting Scholar at Jinan University and has been involved in helping to enhance the double first-class pharmaceutical discipline at Jinan University. During this time he has also been associated with various major scientific research platforms. Since the end of 2019 he has been working on a full-time basis at Jinan University and is serving as the inaugural Director of the Institute for Advanced and Applied Chemical Synthesis. He is also leading the construction of the Biomedical Transformation Platform on the Zhuhai Campus of Jinan University and has been recruiting overseas talents to join in the university. He and his team have recently made several useful scientific discoveries, while also having organized a number of international and high-level academic meetings together with establishing a series of industry-university-research collaborations involving certain Guangdong-based businesses. His receipt of the above-mentioned Guangdong Science and Technology Cooperation Award acknowledges his contributions to discipline enhancement, talent training, foreign cooperation and exchanges, and industry-university-research work undertaken within the province.