On 23rd June 2024, Professor Michael Coey received, along with nine others, the top Chinese honour for foreign scientists, the China Science and Technology Cooperation Award. Mike’s award was sponsored by the Institute of Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, with which he has associations dating back to 1980, most involving research on rare earth magnetism or spin electronics. Many visiting Chinese graduate students and senior scientists have spent periods ranging from a few weeks to several years with his Magnetism and Spin Electronics Group in the School of Physics, Trinity College Dublin.
The presentation was made at a ceremony in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing to celebrate recent Chinese achievements in science. At these ceremonies, now held every two or three years, scientists are given a variety of science and technology awards in the presence of President Xi Jinping and the leaders of the Chinese state, government and communist party. The two main medals were given by President Xi to Li Deren, a distinguished specialist in GPS and remote sensing from Wuhan who currently has 47 PhD students, and Xue Qikun, from Tsinghua, who discovered the quantum anomalous Hall effect in 2013. About 50 other scientists were given medals in a ceremony at which President Xi also made an address on the state of science and technology in China.
Xi Jinping and other leaders of the Communist Party of China and the state meet with representatives of the national sci-tech award winners prior to a meeting conflating the national sci-tech conference, the national science and technology award conference, and the general assemblies of the members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, June 24, 2024