Yingjie Peng
Professor Yingjie Peng from the Department of Astronomy and the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (KIAA) at Peking University was among the 49 recipients of the 2024 XPLORER PRIZE, announced on August 26, 2024.
According to the XPLORER PRIZE website, the initial funding for the XPLORER PRIZE is provided by Tencent Foundation as a non-governmental and public interest award for young scientists and technicians aged 45 and under who are working full-time in the Chinese mainland，Hong Kong or Macao. The XPLORER PRIZE focuses on fundamental science and research. It is a no-strings-attached award for extraordinarily talented young scientists, as an investment in their potential at the forefront of scientific discovery. The XPLORER PRIZE awards a grant of three million RMB to each recipient.
Yingjie Peng joined Peking University in the fall of 2015. Prof. Peng had previously conducted postdoctoral research at the Cavendish Laboratory and the Kavli Institute for Cosmology (KICC) at the University of Cambridge. He earned his Ph.D. in Physics from ETH Zurich in 2012. Yingjie Peng's research focuses on galaxy formation and evolution. Through large sky surveys, he identified two independent star formation quenching processes, and proposed the mass-quenching theory. He developed a theoretical framework based on the continuity approach and the gas regulator model, which has successfully explained the origin of the Schechter form of the galaxy mass function. Additionally, he proposed the angular momentum quenching theory and pioneered a novel method for studying galaxy quenching by analyzing the heavy element content within galaxies, which has since been widely adopted in various surveys.
2024 "XPLORER PRIZE" Announcement: https://xplorerprize.org/
