Jiao Nianzhi

Jiao Nianzhi is an academician at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a TWAS member, and a member of the American Academy of Microbiology. He is also a distinguished professor at Xiamen University. He serves as the chair of the International Joint Working Group on Ocean Negative Emissions of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) and the North Pacific Marine Science Organization (PICES). He is also the co-chair of the "Global-ONCE" International Grand Science Program of the United Nations Decade.

His main research focuses on marine microbial ecological processes and their environmental effects. He has published more than 300 academic papers in top journals such as Science, Nature, PNAS, NSR, ISME-J, AEM and mBio, with over 10,000 citations. Since 2014, he has been a highly cited author in China, according to ESI. He was the first to propose the new mechanism of marine carbon sequestration called the "Microbial Carbon Pump (MCP)", which has been highly cited with individual papers exceeding a thousand citations. The Science magazine described the MCP as the "hidden driver of a massive carbon reservoir" and published a special issue on the MCP. MCP and related theories on marine carbon sinks have been incorporated into China's national strategy for ecological civilization, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report, and the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) of UNESCO's report on ocean carbon.

Jiao has received the Second Prize of National Natural Science Award (ranking first twice), Ho Leung Ho Lee Foundation Science and Technology Advancement Award.