Professor Guo hands over the certificate at the ITP.（Image from Institute of Theoretical Physics） 

After having received the PIFI visiting fellowship, which allowed me to strengthen my collaboration with Professors Guo Fengkun and Zou Bingsong at the Institute of  Theoretical Physics (ITP) as well as with Professor Zhao Qiang at IHEP, in 2018 I was greatly honored and very proud to be awarded the “Distinguished Scientist Award” of the CAS President’s International Fellowship Initiative (PIFI). It not only recognizes my achievements in strong interaction physics, but also the on-going intense and fruitful collaboration with colleagues from the ITP and IHEP as well as from Peking University within the Sino-German Collaborative Research Center CRC 110 “Symmetries and the Emergence of Structure in QCD”. This collaboration has been on-going since July 2016 and has produced a number or remarkable results and achievements. Within this framework, more than 500 papers (with more than 11,000 citations) have been published since June 2012, of which more than 110 have both Chinese and German authors. These include 26 articles in Physical Review Letters, 2 articles in Reviews of Modern Physics, 2 articles in Physics Reports and 2 publications in Nature. The CRC 110 is also a career booster for young scientists. So far we have had 2 Chinese postdocs acting as principal investigators in Germany. Five postdocs and students working within the CRC 110 succeeded in getting funded by the 1000 Talents Project for Young Professionals (four of them were post-docs in the German CRC nodes: Bonn, Jülich and Munich), and another one was funded by the 100 Talents Project of CAS (PhD from Bonn). Up to now, we have 22 Chinese postdocs at the German nodes as well as six Chinese graduate students who obtained their PhD from a German CRC institution. Several of these post-docs have taken faculty positions in China. Furthermore, there are frequent exchanges of postdocs and students from both sides with stays that range from 3 months to 1 year. Also, the researchers from the CRC have pioneered the field of predictions and interpretations of multiquark states (tetra- and pentaquarks); their discoveries were selected as American Physical Society Highlights of the years 2013 and 2015. In particular, let me mention the article in Reviews of Modern Physics (RMP) from Chinese and German principal investigators (including Professors Guo and Zou) ^[1], which is the first-ever RMP review on nuclear and particle physics with the first institution being from China.

Coming back to the Distinguished Scientist Award, it was a big pleasure for me to give a series of introductory lectures on “Strong Interaction Physics” at the ITP in April 2018. These lectures were attended by a large number of students, post-docs and researchers not only from the ITP and IHEP, but also from Peking University, Tsinghua University and Beihang University. As it turned out, the lecture hall was filled beyond its capacity. These lectures were a success as many questions were asked and interesting discussions emerged afterwards. After that, I also visited the theory group at IHEP and again my friends and colleagues at the ITP in August and another short visit is foreseen for December. It is always a great pleasure for me to come to the ITP to enjoy the stimulating atmosphere and the marvelous Chinese food.

[1] F. K. Guo, C. Hanhart, U.-G. Mei？ner, Q. Wang, Q. Zhao and B. S. Zou, “Hadronic molecules,”

Rev. Mod. Phys. 90 (2018) 015004.