10 expats honored with Magnolia Gold Award for 2022
Ten expats from Italy, Australia, Canada, Nepal and the United States were honored with Shanghai's Magnolia Gold Awards on Thursday for their contributions to the city's social and economic development.
Shot by Zhou Shengjie. Edited by Zhou Shengjie. Subtitles by Wang Xinzhou.
Cosimo Bambi, Italian
Xie Xide Junior Professor
Department of Physics, Fudan University
Cosimo Bambi, 42, is a relativist and cosmologist. He joined Fudan University in 2012.
With research interest in fields ranging from strong field tests of general relativity to black holes and X-ray astronomy, the Italian has more than 150 publications and is highly cited. The Quantum Bambi effect is named after him.
In the past 10 years, his work has helped China cultivate talent and improve the quality of education and research in astrophysics.
He has managed to publish two textbooks, on particle cosmology and general relativity, respectively, in Chinese. He also delivers speeches at various universities and actively participates in all kinds of research exchange activities to promote the teaching of astrophysics.
He established Fudan's first team dedicated to the research of high-energy astrophysics and black holes, which includes not only Chinese students but also international students and postdoctoral researchers from other countries.
With his efforts, the team has launched cooperation with peers from world-renowned universities, such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology, California Institute of Technology and the University of Cambridge.
The 2018 Shanghai Magnolia Silver Award winner has instructed 32 undergraduates with their dissertations, and eight master's students and 11 of his doctoral students have graduated. He has also instructed in the research of 11 postdoctoral researchers.
So dedicated to research and teaching that even the COVID-19 pandemic did not stop him. He has published 51 papers since 2020.
Jolyon Warren Lewis Bulley, Australian
Chief Executive Officer
IHG China
Jolyon Warren Lewis Bulley, 60, has been working in Shanghai for eight years and was a recipient of Shanghai Magnolia Silver Award in 2020. Under his efforts, InterContinental Hotels Group has made great contributions to Shanghai's and China's social and economic development, as well as the fight against the pandemic.
In the past 10 years, IHG has increased the number of its hotels in China from 167 to 618. In Shanghai, the number rose from 28 to 61. Many of its hotels have become landmarks in Shanghai, such as InterContinental Shanghai Wonderland in Sheshan, suburban Songjiang District, InterContinental Shanghai Ruijin in downtown Huangpu District and Hotel Indigo Shanghai On The Bund.
Despite the impact of the pandemic, it opened 88 new hotels in China, a historic high, in 2021.
According its plan, the group will have more than 1,300 hotels in China by 2027, providing more than 100,000 jobs.
IHG has been supporting China's fight against the pandemic. In 2020, it donated 1.5 million yuan (US$215,100) for the construction of the Leishenshan makeshift hospital in Wuhan. In the past two years, more than 150 of its hotels have accommodated front-line pandemic control staff or served as quarantine hotels. In the first half of 2022 alone, its 52 hotels in Shanghai served as quarantine sites.
It has also launched several environmental campaigns in the past two years to reduce 25 percent of energy consumption and aims at reducing carbon emission by 46 percent by 2030.
The group has raised more than 15 million yuan to set up 40 Hope Primary Schools, a kind of charity schools for children from impoverished families in less developed areas in China.
Liming Gu, Canadian
President
Perfect World Zhengqi (Shanghai) Multimedia Technology Co Ltd
Liming Gu, 54, won the Shanghai Magnolia Silver Award in 2020. He and his company have made great contributions to Shanghai's vision to become a global eSports center.
After reaching a strategic cooperation agreement with American video game developer, publisher and digital distribution company Valve in 2018, Gu led Perfect World Zhengqi to set up its headquarters in Zhangjiang of Shanghai and quickly helped gather clusters of related industrial chains, including clubs, livestreaming businesses and venues in Shanghai.
Its "Zhengqi Pingtai," which translates to "Steam Platform," officially debuted in February, 2021 and has released 112 games, including some from over 30 domestic game developers.
Gu and his company have been active in promoting the development of the eSports industry and including it in sports galas such as Olympics and Asian Games. After several years of communication with these event organizing committees, DOTA 2 became an eSports performance game in Shanghai ahead of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics and will be a formal competition item in the Asian Games in Hangzhou next year.
Despite the pandemic, the company established an eSports center in Yangpu District. With new eSports competition brands and production models, it offered 2,634 hours of game livestreams in Chinese, English, Russian, Spanish and Portuguese in two years, attracting more than 200 million eSports lovers from around the world.
On June 1, his firm officially signed an agreement with the government of the Pudong New Area to settle its metaverse program in Shanghai with confidence in industrial development of the city.
Ashish Maskay, Nepalese
Senior Orthopedic Assistant Surgeon
Shanghai United Family Hospital
Ashish Maskay, 51, is a 2020 Shanghai Magnolia Silver Award recipient. Having spent more than one-third of his life in the city, the Nepalese is famous in the expatriate and local communities partly for blood donation activities.
Born in a doctor's family, he witnessed how his father provided free medical services for poor people, which embedded a charity seed in his heart.
He came to Shanghai 19 years ago for a master's program at Huashan Hospital with governmental scholarship, and joined Shanghai United Family Hospital in 2007 after graduation, specializing in diagnosis and treatment of general orthopedic and sports medicine diseases.
As a surgeon, Maskay knows the importance of blood in surgeries. Having long been involved in blood donation, he established a team of expatriate blood donation volunteers and launched Bloodline in 2016. It organizes blood donation events regularly in interesting ways and makes it a fashion lifestyle for international families in the city.
By gathering people of different nationalities and different cultural backgrounds together, Maskay wishes to make foreigners feel they are part of the city, instead of outsiders.
He gathered more than 200 foreigners via WeChat during the pandemic to donate blood and help the Shanghai Blood Center cope with the lack of blood.
In March this year, in the face of the COVID-19 resurgence, Maskay launched the "Healing Together" campaign to support the fight against the pandemic via blood donation. He also called on foreigners to record videos to cheer for Shanghai.
Michael Farley Moyers, American
Chairman
Department of Medical Physics, Shanghai Proton and Heavy Ion Center
Michael Farley Moyers, 67, is a world-famous medical physicist with more than 30 years of clinical and research experience in particle therapy. He is also a key author of some international standards for radioactive particle therapy.
He has been working in Shanghai for nearly nine years and is principal physicist at Shanghai Proton and Heavy Ion Center. He has led his team of physicists and therapists to apply cutting-edge technology in treating cancer and successfully cured more than 1,000 patients annually, topping all other medical institutions around the world.
He has also helped train medical students, doctors and technicians, who work in different organizations in China.
Medical physicist is a new profession in China. There were no specific standards for career development. Moyers has helped develop standard training programs and a five-tier career development system for medical physicists, which has greatly improved the capacity of related professionals and inspired their passion for the job.
Moyers has been granted the Chinese green card, or permanent residence permit.
Xiaoping Shen, American
Director, Professor & Vice President
Shanghai Sipo Polytechnic
Xiaoping Shen, 71, was born in Shanghai and went to the US for studies in the 1980s. He came back to join Shanghai Sipo Polytechnic and founded its nursing school, the first such private school in Shanghai, in 2003 and has developed an educational system in line with international standards. He won the Shanghai Magnolia Silver Award in 2008.
In the year he returned, China was hit by SARS.
"At that time, I felt the urgent need of training a larger and more professional nursing team in China," Shen said.
After 19 years, Sipo's nursing school has become a demonstration site for health service education among all vocational schools in China.
More than half of its 10,000-plus graduates in the past 16 years have been recruited by top hospitals in China, boasting a 99 percent annual employment rate on average, much higher than the average rate among vocational schools in the country.
Shen has also been active in promoting international exchanges. The nursing school has hosted several international seminars on topics such as evidence-based nursing education and education of nursing combining medical treatment and elderly care.
Shen also initiated an alliance with seven other privately run nursing schools and promoted coordination in the Yangtze River Delta region to push the development of nursing schools in the region and the whole country.
Its graduates have been working on the front line in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, more than 60 of them headed to Wuhan and more than 20 worked at the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center, a designated hospital for treating COVID-19 patients. Some even worked abroad.
This year, graduates of Sipo's nursing school can be seen everywhere, including designated hospitals, makeshift hospitals, quarantine sites, nucleic acid test sampling sites and community volunteer teams.
"I'm really proud of them and feel that the almost 20 years of hard work has paid off," said Shen.
James Wunderman, American
President & CEO
Bay Area Council
James Wunderman, 65, a 2019 Shanghai Magnolia Silver Award winner, was honored one of the top 100 influential politicians in California for his dedication to promoting infrastructure, health care, housing and sustainable development in the Bay Area.
Since 2007, he has been leading the Bay Area Council members to carry out mutual visits with officials from Shanghai and such provinces as Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Guangdong, serving as a bridge for Sino-American friendship and promoting bilateral exchanges in areas ranging from science and technology innovation to trade and culture.
In the past year, Wunderman launched several initiatives, including responding to the impact of global climate change and poverty alleviation. He also provided a lot of suggestions for the development of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area.
Additionally, last September, he paved the way by organizing the 2022 North American Forum at the World AI Conference in Shanghai which included many pioneers from the world's leading AI hub at the global event.
Since 2011, the Bay Area Council has been organizing celebration for the Chinese New Year each year to foster mutual understanding and moved the event online in the past two years due to the pandemic.
It has set up an office in Shanghai to promote exchanges and cooperation with Yangpu District and the Yangtze River Delta region. It has help more than 100 investment project bridging events and organized more than 500 Californian government officials, enterprise executives and university representatives to visit Shanghai.
Wunderman also assisted Edmund G. Brown, former California governor, to set up an office in Shanghai to promote trade cooperation between the US state and Shanghai.
Under his efforts, Yangpu District and Palo Alto of California established a sistership to promote people-to-people exchanges.
Since the start of the pandemic, Wunderman's Bay Area Council has organized over a dozen online conferences to promote cooperation between China and the US in fighting the pandemic.
Believing dialogue and cooperation between China and the US are still the mainstream in bilateral ties, he led the council to keep close contact with China and continue to promote exchanges and cooperation between the two countries.
Daquan Xu, American
Executive Vice President
Bosch (China) Investment, Ltd
Daquan Xu, 59, has been working in Shanghai for 17 years and won the Magnolia Silver Award in 2017.
Led by Xu, Bosch China increased its sales volume by five times between 2011 and 2021, with automobile and smart transport technology contributing 70 percent of the total.
Embracing China's integrated development strategy in the Yangtze River Delta region, Bosch China completed construction of its innovation and software R&D center in Wuxi, neighboring Jiangsu Province, in 2020 and planned to open new branches in Shanghai.
Xu has been leading Bosch China in applying artificial intelligence in manufacturing to improve efficiency and save costs. Its team has helped improve speed and accuracy of polymerase chain reaction tests.
Bosch China is supporting China's efforts in reaching carbon emission peak in 2030 and carbon neutrality in 2060. In 2019 and 2020, it invested about 120 million yuan for carbon neutrality and its China headquarters became the first industrial enterprise to realize the target in 2020 and is sharing its experiences with other enterprises.
It now envisions to further reduce carbon emission by 15 percent and support China to reach carbon emission peak in 2028.
Xu also led Bosch China to establish a charity center in 2011, which has made 156 million yuan of donations and operated more than 230 charity programs. Its employees also offer more than 6,000 hours of voluntary services each year.
In 2020, Bosch China donated more than 8 million yuan for China's fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. This year, it donated 650,000 yuan to Shanghai's Changning District for pandemic control and charity programs. It also donated 1.15 million yuan to buy daily necessities and anti-pandemic materials for 5,700 senior residents in three nursing homes.
Huaqiang Xu, American
Director & Professor
Center for Structure and Function of Drug Targets, Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Huaqiang Xu, 58, is an outstanding scientist in the research of protein science and has been working in Shanghai for eight years. Besides the 2020 Shanghai Magnolia Silver Award, last year he won the Tan Jiazhen Life Science Award and this year the Wu Jieping-Paul Janssen Medical & Pharmaceutical Award.
His team holds more than 10 patents at home and abroad, among which the highly potent glucocorticoid compounds have hit the market.
He has also trained more than 30 postgraduates, some of whom are now leaders of scientific research teams or founders of medical startups.
His laboratory has established cooperation with scientists in the US and Europe and de-structured more than 30 G protein coupled receptors, making the lab increasingly influential in CPCR research.
In 2020, his team worked 46 days continuously to uncover the high-resolution cryo-EM structure of Remdesivir-bound RNA replicase complex from the infective virus of COVID-19. In the following two years, the team has made several other findings to provide guidance for treatment of the disease, vaccine inoculation and medicine development.
VV116, a new drug developed by Xu and his joint research team, was the first domestically developed oral drug to be approved in overseas markets for treating COVID-19.
Yi Zhang, American
President of Asia Pacific & Global Vice President
DuPont
Yi Zhang, 54, has worked in Shanghai for 11 years and received the Magnolia Silver Award in 2020.
Zhang believes that investing in Shanghai is investing in the future, so DuPont has made a strong investment in the city, with seven exclusively funded ventures and four regional headquarters by the end of last year, and has been honored as top 100 best foreign investors in Shanghai several times.
Under Zhang's leadership, DuPont has established an R&D center in Shanghai, the largest one outside its US headquarters. It's now constructing its OLED advanced display material laboratory.
Zhang is also active in promoting Shanghai's international exchanges, organizing mutual visits between DuPont America and its industrial partners in Shanghai. In 2021, he and executives of more than 50 foreign-invested ventures established a digital transformation commission.
Also under his suggestion, a sustainable development commission was established under the Shanghai Foreign Investment Association.
He said all these platforms can help foreign companies know about Shanghai and China better.
After the outbreak of the pandemic, Zhang worked closely with the DuPont team to bring back more than 500,000 sets of protection gears from overseas to Shanghai. The company cooperated with local authorities to ensure material supplies and stock.
Between 2020 and March this year, DuPont has provided materials for about 2.5 million sets of protection clothing for Shanghai.
The recipients of this year's Magnolia Gold Award pose during the ceremony.
