On August 1, 2022, Springer Nature announced that 10 English academic books had won the 4th "China New Development Awards," and the English monograph "Earthquake Disaster Simulation of Civil Infrastructures: From Tall Buildings to Urban Areas," co-authored by Professor Lu Xinzheng of the Department of Civil Engineering at Tsinghua University and Professor Guan Hong of Griffith University in Australia, was among them.

Springer Nature launched the "China New Development Award" in 2019, aiming to promote the achievement of sharing relevant research to promote the realization of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This year is the fourth edition. All award-winning books this year were selected from nearly 870 books and conference papers published in 2021 by Chinese authors, under Springer and Palgrave Macmillan, both subsidiaries of Springer Nature.

The subject coverage of the winning books broadly includes: engineering, earth sciences, computer science, medicine, education, social sciences, political science, and international relations, reflecting more comprehensively China's important research contributions in these fields to promote the United Nations SDG’s.

Earthquakes pose a huge threat to engineering structures and cities in China and globally, and Tsinghua University has conducted long-term and in-depth research in many fields of earthquake engineering. The English monograph "Earthquake Disaster Simulation of Civil Infrastructures: From Tall Buildings to Urban Areas" systematically summarizes the research achievements of Professor Lu Xinzheng's research team. These include triumphs in the fields of new numerical models, high-performance calculation methods, high realism visualization methods, performance-based design, and loss assessment methods for earthquake disaster simulation of high-rise buildings and urban area building clusters. This provided an important research method and tool for reducing earthquake disasters.

Award certificate and award book cover.

Dr. Niels Peter Thomas, CEO of Springer Nature Greater China (left),

Ms. Wang Yanchun, Managing Director of Greater China (right), presented the award to Professor Lu Xinzheng (center).