Under the Patronage of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques,
King Salman Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud

and supported by

the Permanent Mission of Saudi Arabia to the United Nations in Vienna,

the Permanent Mission of Saudi Arabia to the United Nations in New York, and

the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA)

The 11th Awards Ceremony of the Prince Sultan
Bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water (2024)

United Nations Office at Vienna, VIC

8 November 2024, 16:00-17:30 Conference Room 1

Event Website Register here

The event will be followed by a dinner at the VIC restaurant to which you are invited.

 

Winners for the 11th Award

Leading international scientists with a diversity of backgrounds -- including materials science, chemistry, engineering, and environmental science, as well as hydrology -- won the five prizes for a wide variety of relevant, groundbreaking solutions that promise to help provide needed drinking water to the world's people.

 

Creativity Prize: The team of Maria Cristina Rulli (Polytechnic of Milan, Italy) and Paolo D’Odorico (University of California, Berkeley, USA)

They spearheaded novel analyses of the water-energy-food nexus, describing how numerous, complex factors interact, providing managers and policymakers better ways to be stewards of freshwater in a changing, globalised world.

Photo of Maria Cristina Rulli
Photo of Paolo Odorico
Photo of Zhighu He

Creativity Prize: The team of Zhiguo He (Zhejiang University, China)

The team is awarded for developing working, versatile soft robots with unprecedented manoeuvrability that have the capacity for numerous underwater research and monitoring applications.

Team members include: Pengcheng Jiao and Yang Yang.

Photo of Qiuhua Liang

Surface Water Prize: Surface Water Prize: Qiuhua Liang (Loughborough University, UK) and his team

The team is awarded for developing pioneering, open-source, multi-GPU hydrodynamic models to support real-time flood forecasting at high temporal-spatial resolutions.

Team members include: Huili Chen, Xiaodong Ming, Xilin Xia, Yan Xiong and Jiaheng Zhao.

Photo of ChunMiao Zheng

Groundwater Prize: Chunmiao Zheng (Eastern Institute of Technology, Ningbo, China) and his team

The team is awarded for developing powerful modelling tools to understand groundwater processes and manage groundwater resources under diverse eco-hydrological and climatic conditions, considering environmental and socioeconomic factors at local and national scales.

Team members include: Yingying Yao and Erhu Du.

Photo of Virender K Sharma

Alternative Water Resources Prize: Virender K. Sharma (Texas A&M University, USA) and his team

The team is awarded for pioneering techniques using activated ferrate in advanced oxidative processes to effectively remove antibiotics and pharmaceuticals from wastewater. These processes work at high, and even enhanced, efficiency in water containing commonly occurring natural organic matter that often inhibit the effectiveness of oxidative processes in removing micropollutants.

Team members include: Ching-Hua Huang, Chetan Jinadatha and Radek Zbořil.

Photo of Joseph Lee

Water Management & Protection Prize: Joseph Hun-wei Lee (Macau University of Science and Technology, China)

He is awarded for developing unique and highly effective hydro-environmental modelling systems for the sustainable water management of smart cites.