On February 12th, 2020, the award ceremony for 2019 Newton Prize was held in London, UK. More than 200 representatives from the Newton Fund, UK Research and Innovation, universities, UK and foreign governmental agencies, and award winners themselves attended the event. Mr. Chris Skidmore, the UK Science and Innovation Minister, Professor Alice Gast, the Newton Prize Chair, and other political or scientific leaders attended the ceremony and awarded the winners.

The 2019 Newton Prize attracted more than 150 project teams from China, Indonesia, and the Philippines, to contend for the awards. Finally, one Chair’s Award and three Country Awards were granted to 4 project teams. “A new way to monitor crops for global food security”, the outcome of a collaborative project between Institute of Agricultural Resources and Regional Planning at CAAS (IARRP) and UK University College London (UCL), wins the Chair’s Award in 2019 Newton Prize.

During 2016-2019, a joint project team from IARRP and UCL finished the international collaborative project entitled “Quantitative remote sensing and data assimilation for regional crop growth monitoring”, jointly funded by NSFC and STFC, with Professor Zhongxin Chen (IARRP) as Chinese PI and Professor Philip Lewis (UCL) as UK PI. Besides IARRP and UCL, the other project consortium members are Beijing Normal University, Peking University, China Agricultural University, UK SME Assimila, and others. After the 3-year effective collaboration between remote sensing scientists in China and UK, a breakthrough was made in the remote sensing data assimilation techniques for regional crop growth monitoring and assessment, with better accuracy and efficiency. The project team proposed a novel technical system for regional crop growth and health monitoring in data-inadequate and weather-unfavorable conditions or regions. A Sino-UK international collaboration platform for agricultural remote sensing was set up. A series of intellectual property outcomes, including ISI-indexed papers, patents, and software, was achieved by the collaborative project team.

A trophy of £459,000 is granted to the 2019 Newton Prize Chair’s Award winner, which will fund the project team to extend their project innovative techniques in the experimental region in Africa, to promote global food security.

Mr. Chris Skidmore, the UK Science and Innovation Minister (left), Minister Wen Chen from the Chinese Embassy in London (right) and Professor Alice Gast, President of Imperial College London and the Newton Prize Chair (2nd from right) awarding the UK-China project team of the 2019 Chair’s Award

The certificate of the 2019 Newton Prize Chair’s Award 2019