XU Jinghua
Xu Jinghua, distinguished professor, male, born in Nanjing in 1929, is the son of Professor Xu Xinwu, the former president of Henan University. He is a world-renowned geologist, oceanographer and environmentalist. He was one of the foreign academicians of American Academy of Sciences (1986) and Third World Academy of Sciences (1986) as well as Mediterranean Academy of Sciences (1988), etc. Because of his contribution to Chinese geology, he was awarded an honorary professorship of Chinese Academy of Sciences (1985), academician of Taiwan Academia Sinica (1990) and an honorary doctorate of Nanjing University.
Education: He was admitted to the Department of Geology of Central University in 1944 (renamed Nanjing University in 1949) and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in July 1948. In the same year, he went to the United States for further study to obtain a master’s degree from Ohio State University in 1950, and obtained a doctorate from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1953.
Resume: He worked in Shell Oil Company in 1954 and taught at New York State University and California University from 1963 to 1967. Since 1967, he has moved to Switzerland and taught at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and he was the dean of Earth Sciences. He once was the Chairman of the International Sedimentary Society and the International Marine Geology Committee, he also was the member of the Executive Committee of the International Oceanographic Commission, and he was the First President of the European Geophysical Association.
He was the representative of UNESCO of Switzerland, expert of the United Nations Expert Group on Submarine Disposal of Nuclear Waste, technical consultant of the Chinese and Maltese Governments of the United Nations, former consultant of the Chinese Ministry of Geology, the Ministry of Petroleum Geology and the Ministry of Chemical Industry.
He has been hired as editor-in-chief or editorial board member by more than 20 world-class authoritative academic journals such as Journal of Sedimentation and Marine Geophysical Research. He has served as the leader of many international scientific cooperation projects, such as JOIDES Ocean Drilling Project, Upper Mantle Project, Lithosphere Project, Global Change Project and International Investigation Project in Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet.
Achievements and awards: 450 papers and more than 20 works have been published.
He has served as a visiting professor or researcher from all continents, and is a famous Guggenheim scholar in the United States (1971), a senior marine geology scholar of Queen Elizabeth (1981), Professor Fairchild (1990), etc. He is one of the few scientists who won the Wollaston Prize (1984) and Penrose Prize (2001). The Wollaston prize is compared to the Nobel prize in natural science, which was awarded to William Smith and Charles Lyle, the founders of geology, and Charles Darwin and Thomas Hershey, the originators of biological evolution. He also won the highest prizes in different fields of other geosciences, including sedimentology, sedimentary geology, marine geology, petroleum geology, tectonics and so on.
He is also an inventor with many patented technologies. For example, “filter-water converter” invented by him is a revolutionary technology for sewage treatment, “capillary irrigation technology” will turn barren land with water shortage into oasis, and “oil recovery technology” will alleviate the oil energy crisis. He idenyified the relationship between nitrite pollution and cancer, and put forward a clear discussion on the basis of experimental observation. Therefore, he was employed as the director of Environment and Health Center of Henan University.
