Ma Junzhang, an alumnus of the College of Physics at Jilin University and currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at City University of Hong Kong, has been awarded the 2025 C. N. Yang Award (AAPPS–APCTP C. N. Yang Award) by the Association of Asia Pacific Physical Societies (AAPPS) and the Asia Pacific Center for Theoretical Physics (APCTP). The award recognizes his groundbreaking contributions to the discovery and characterization of novel quasiparticles in quantum materials.

Ma earned his bachelor’s degree from the College of Physics at Jilin University in 2011 and completed his Ph.D. in condensed matter physics at the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2017. He then conducted joint postdoctoral research at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland before joining City University of Hong Kong in 2021.

The C. N. Yang Award, jointly established by AAPPS and APCTP, honors young physicists in the Asia–Pacific region who have made outstanding research contributions and aims to nurture the next generation of scientific leaders. Originally named the AAPPS Award, it was later renamed in recognition of Nobel Laureate Chen-Ning Yang’s long-standing contributions to physics in the Asia–Pacific region. The award is presented annually to three young researchers worldwide across fields such as statistical physics, condensed matter physics, and quantum information.