The Outstanding PolyU Alumni Award (OPAA) recognizes successful graduates of PolyU who have excelled in their chosen fields, supported their alma mater, and contributed to the wider community. Since 2022, achievement categories have been established to celebrate considerable accomplishments of our alumni in specific areas, including professional achievement, entrepreneurial achievement, scholarly achievement, and community service achievement. The Award is organized at three levels to engage alumni at the departmental, faculty/school, and university levels.
We are pleased to announce the 2023 awardees of the Outstanding Alumni Award for the PolyU Department of Applied Mathematics, who were nominated and selected in May. Congratulations to the following awardees on their well-deserved recognition for their outstanding achievements:
Scholarly Achievement (Young Alumni)
Dr Hu Yaohua
Doctor of Philosophy, Department of Applied Mathematics, PolyU/ 2013
Dr Hu is a Distinguished Professor of College of Mathematics and Statistics at Shenzhen University. He received a BSc in Mathematics and MSc in Computational Mathematics from Zhejiang University in 2007 and 2009, respectively, and a PhD in Applied Mathematics from PolyU in 2013. His research interests include theory and algorithms for large-scale optimization, and applications in statistics, machine learning, bioinformatics, and image processing. He has published 46 papers on prestigious international journals, such as SIAM Journal on Optimization (2019, 2018, 2016, 2013), Journal of Machine Learning Research (2017), Inverse Problems (2017), European Journal of Operational Research (2022, 2015), Briefings in Bioinformatics (2022, 2021), Transportation Research Part B/ Part E (2022, 2021, 2017). His Google Scholar citation number is 618 with an H-index of 18. He has served as PI of 14 research grants, including National Science Foundation of China for Outstanding Young Scholars (2022) and National Science Foundation of Shenzhen for Distinguished Young Scholars (2023).
Dr Hu received the First Prize of The Outstanding Research Output Award of Computational Mathematic in 2021, and was awarded as an Outstanding Young Scholars by the National Science Foundation of China in 2022, and a Distinguished Young Scholars by the National Science Foundation of Shenzhen in 2023.
Scholarly Achievement (Young Alumni)
Dr Zhao Shi
Master of Philosophy, Department of Applied Mathematics, PolyU/ 2018
Bachelor of Science in Investment Science, Department of Applied Mathematics, PolyU/ 2016
Dr Zhao is a Postdoctoral Fellow of Centre for Health Systems and Policy Research, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He obtained a Bachelor’s degree and a MPhil degree from PolyU in 2016 and 2018, respectively, and a PhD from The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
As of 20 June 2023, Dr Zhao’s Google Scholar citation number is 7,803 with an H-index of 33. Among approximately 520,000 global academic papers on Expertscape, a scientific literature platform dedicated to evaluating research results in the field of disease outbreak research, Dr Zhao's research papers were rank in the top 0.04% globally.
He is also in the Editor Board of BMC Infectious Diseases; European Journal of Medical Research. In 2019 International Society for Disease Surveillance Conference, he received the Second Place in Outstanding Research Article in Biosureillance in the category of Scientific Achievement.
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