On Sep 25, the awards list of the 2nd Xplorer Prize was released. 50 young scientists won this honor, who will each get a total of 3 million yuan funded by Tencent Foundation to support their research. Prof. Yu Yu from the CS Department of SJTU was one of the six winners in the area of mathematics and physics.

This year over 1200 young scientist filed application and only 1/25 of them finally obtained the prize.

The XPLORER PRIZE is a non-governmental and public interest award for young scientists and technicians aged 45 and below who are working full-time on the Chinese mainland. It was initiated by Huateng Ma, Yi Rao, Zhenning Yang, Yigong Shi, Jianwei Pan and other renowned scientists. Every year 50 scholars are selected for the prize.

Yu Yu is currently a professor at the CS Department of SJTU. He is mainly engaged in cryptography related research. He got his bachelor’s degree in the Department of Computer Science of Fudan University in 2003 and PhD degree in the School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University in 2006. Then he worked as Postdoc at T-Systems and Catholic University of Louvain. In 2011, he came back to teach at East China Normal University and Tsinghua University. He has published a number of papers in the three most influential conferences in cryptography(CRYPTO/EUROCRYPT/ASIACRYPT) as well as in other significant conferences like ACM CCS,IEEE S&P and TCC. He is now the Asiacrypt Steering Committee member, inspector of the IACR board, and the steering committee member of EUROCRYPT 2020 and 2021.