Announcing the Winners of the Luke Howard and Timothy Oke Awards 2024!

Dear IAUC community,

It is with great pleasure that we announce the winners of the Luke Howard Award 2024 and the Timothy Oke Award 2024, recognizing outstanding contributions to the field of urban climate.

Luke Howard Award 2024

Prof Edward Ng (Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China)

Prof Edward Ng has been awarded Luke Howard Award 2024 for his lifelong achievements and unwavering commitment to the urban climate community, particularly his exceptional leadership in bridging urban climate science with urban design and planning practice.

Biography

Professor Edward Ng is an architect and Yao Ling Sun Professor of Architecture in the School of Architecture of The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). He specializes in Green Building, Environmental and Sustainable Design, and Urban Climatology for City Planning. As an environmental consultant to the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, Edward developed the performance-based daylight design practice note, the Air Ventilation Assessment Technical Guidelines and the Urban Climatic Maps for City Planning. He has worked with the governments and agencies in Singapore, Macau and several Chinese cities on Urban Climatic Maps. Recently, he has focused on designing for the elderly, taking climate change into account. Edward has published over 500 papers and 3 books. He has twice received the International Award from the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). His project won the World Building of the Year Award at the 2017 World Architecture Festival (WAF) in Berlin. Cambridge University has also honoured him with a prestigious Doctor of Science (DSc) degree.

Timothy Oke Award 2024

Prof Wenfeng Zhan (Nanjing University, China)

Prof Wenfeng Zhan has been awarded Timothy Oke Award 2024 for his excellent research in urban climate, particularly his important contributions to thermal remote sensing in urban environment.

Biography

Wenfeng Zhan is now a Full Professor at the International Institute of Earth System Science, Nanjing University, China. He received his B.E. (with Honors) from Wuhan University, China, in 2007, and his Ph.D. (with Honors) from Beijing Normal University, China, in 2012. From 2010 to 2011, during his doctoral studies, he was a joint Ph.D. student at the University of Western Ontario (now Western University), Canada. He was also a Visiting Scholar at Yale University, United States, from 2019 to 2020.

Professor Zhan was promoted to Full Professor at Nanjing University in 2018. Prior to this promotion, his research focused on satellite thermal remote sensing. Since approximately 2018, his research has strategically shifted to thermal remote sensing of urban climatology and urban environments, driven by his early academic training and a strong interest in the urban heat island phenomenon.

He currently serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Letters. He has authored or co-authored over 100 peer-reviewed journal articles. His H-index is 46, and his publications have received over 6,000 citations (Google Scholar). His research has been featured in various media outlets, including Nature Asia, AGU Media, China News Network, among others.

Timothy Oke Award 2024

Prof Jia Chen (Technical University of Munich, Germany)

Prof Jia Chen has been awarded Timothy Oke Award 2024 for her excellent research in urban climate, particularly her unique contributions to greenhouse gas monitoring and measurement in urban areas.

Biography

Jia Chen is Professor for Environmental Sensing and Modeling in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Technical University of Munich. She is also an Associate at the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. Jia Chen studied electrical engineering and information technology at the University of Karlsruhe (Dipl.-Ing.) and was awarded a Doctorate of Engineering (Dr.-Ing.) summa cum laude from the Technical University of Munich. She was a postdoctoral fellow in the Environmental Science & Engineering Department at Harvard University until 2015.

Jia Chen’s research focuses on urban observation and modeling tools for monitoring greenhouse gases and air pollution. She develops novel sensors, sensor networks, mathematical methods, and atmospheric models to localize and quantify greenhouse gas emissions and understand the metabolism of air pollutants in urban environments. Jia Chen serves as the Scientific Lead for Munich in the EU project ICOS Cities, was named one of Germany’s “Top 40 under 40” by the magazine Capital, and selected to be a member of the Global Young Academy. Further, she participated as an expert in the scoping meeting for the IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Cities. She is a recipient of an ERC Consolidator Grant and the Arnold-Sommerfeld-Award.

Timothy Oke Award 2024

Prof Simone Kotthaus (École Polytechnique, France)

Prof Simone Kotthaus has been awarded Timothy Oke Award 2024 for her excellent research in urban climate, particularly her important contributions to observing and understanding the urban boundary layer.

Biography

Simone Kotthaus is Assistant Professor at the Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique (LMD) at École Polytechnique, with a specific interest in urban atmosphere dynamics and their impact on critical risk factors, such as heat and air pollution. Her research focuses on surface-atmosphere exchange processes driven by the built-up surface, vegetation, and anthropogenic activities, in the context of synoptic weather conditions. She is actively engaged in various teaching, community development, and knowledge exchange activities. In a current project, Simone Kotthaus is developing an interdisciplinary knowledge hub on urban greening in the Paris region to support city resilience.

Using a range of measurement techniques, her work on novel retrieval methods continues to result in advanced observational data products and tools that are of high value for process studies, the evaluation of numerical simulations, and teaching activities. Simone Kotthaus received her PhD in Micrometeorology from King’s College London in 2014 and has since been researching urban environments of various complexities at the University of Reading, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Institut Pierre Simon Laplace and École Polytechnique.


Congratulations to All Awardees!

Best regards,
IAUC team

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