The 2021 Award evaluation process is carried out according to regulations, including checking application conditions; consult experts to review; evaluated at the Foundation’s Scientific Council (OSC) and the Award Council. On April 29, 2021, the Prize Council for 2021 met to evaluate and select applications. However, after more than 4 hours of discussion and voting, the Award Council decided not to recommend awarding the nominations. On May 13, 2021, the Minister of Science and Technology approved this proposal. Too few good records? Professor Ngo Viet Trung, Chairman of the Award Council, said that this year, although the number of applications for evaluation and selection was similar to previous years, after the initial review, there were only 2 scientific activities in Earth Science and Science. Environmental and Agricultural Biology nominate 2 entries for the Main Prize and 2 for the Junior Award for consideration at the Awards Panel. This year’s nominations are all in the experimental field, related to issues of concern to scientists around the world. It is the work of Assoc.Prof.Dr. Ngo Duc Thanh, Dr. Bui Minh Tuan on climate change in rain, and the work on the use of antibiotic substitutes in aquaculture by Dr. Do Huu Hoang, a project on the technical system of growing chrysanthemums on a large scale by Dr. Hoang Thanh Tung. Will young scientists have more opportunities at the Ta Quang Buu Prize? Prof. Nguyen Huu Duc, Chairman of the Physics Council, said that although this year the Science Council also received a number of applications, including works published in journals with IF coefficients, but did not nominate any works. to the Awards Committee. Explaining this, Prof. Duc said the reason is that most of these works have only been published about half a year ago, while the Physics Council thinks that it is necessary to evaluate the works at an international level, through by number of citations. “So the Physics committee members agreed to give it another year to have a more accurate assessment of the publication quality with these works.” In the Science Council in Mathematics, there are also two nominations that, according to Prof. Ngo Viet Trung, are of sufficient quality. However, at the time of voting, both of these applications did not receive 2/3 of the votes to be nominated to the Award Council. This may have caused a negative resonance if people did not understand the situation of this year “- Professor Trung shared. “However, I confirm that no works have been awarded the award that does not fully reflect the development reality of the country’s science and technology.” According to Professor Ngo Viet Trung, looking at the quality of international publication of basic science today, the number of articles in leading journals has increased markedly and the quality is much better than the time when there was a Ta Quang Buu Award. “However, each year the quantity and quality of applications for awarding the Prize depends on many other factors such as the self-nomination of scientists or the nomination of research and training organizations. create. Scientists are afraid to nominate themselves for the prize, while many agencies are not interested in nominating outstanding works. In addition, awarding a prize to an individual or to a work also limits nominations because scientific achievements are often confirmed through a cluster of works and through the cooperation of many scientists. Professor Ngo Viet Trung also said that it is important that the quality of the award is guaranteed. “It’s normal for an award not to be given by anyone. The Board of Directors has worked very seriously, not for the sake of having a prize but trying to award it, which will affect the prestige of the award. For example, China’s highest national award for science and technology (worth about $750,000) has gone without a prize twice, Mr. Trung cited. In particular, in 2015, there was no award, but China had a Nobel Prize in Medicine right before the national award. Young scientists need to be taken care of The 2021 season has passed, but according to Prof. Ngo Viet Trung, there are contents that the Foundation needs to discuss to draw lessons for the following years, so that the award can achieve the purpose of promoting research in basic science and technology. encourage young researchers. He also expressed the view that “need to pay more attention to young scientists”. “I and other members are trying to propose to the Ministry of Science and Technology so that each industry has a young award and the young award recipient will be a typical scientist for his or her specialty.” Prof. Nguyen Huu Duc also expressed his support that next year the regulations should change a bit, such as increasing the number of young prizes, and some more detailed award criteria. “Currently, the criteria of the award are heavy on hard indexes such as the influence of magazines, and the ability to deeply analyze the value of each work still has some shortcomings. Therefore, in my opinion, it is necessary to balance the hard criteria with the specific value and unique points of the work, plus expert opinion, public opinion because there are works published in ordinary journals but very difficult. excellent”. Ta Quang Buu Prize is an annual award of the Ministry of Science and Technology to encourage and honor scientists who play a key role in excellent scientific works, carried out in Vietnam, and published on the Internet. prestigious international scientific journals in the field of natural sciences and engineering. The award has been implemented since 2013, in the past 7 years, it has received more than 360 applications, awarded 16 main prizes and 4 awards for young scientists.

Assoc.Prof.Dr. Ngo Duc Thanh, Hanoi University of Science and Technology. (Photo: Bich Lien) That is shared by Assoc. Ngo Duc Thanh, Hanoi University of Science and Technology – a young scientist who has just received the nomination for the Ta Quang Buu Prize in 2021 announced by the Ministry of Science and Technology. Sincere and full of enthusiasm of the scientist who met us, Assoc.Prof.Dr. Thanh said: Global climate change (CC) is a contemporary challenge that humanity is facing. Many human and computational resources are focused by the world to make future climate change scenarios under different assumptions. In 2012, at an international conference in Vietnam led by Assoc. Ngo Duc Thanh co-organized, Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiments (Southeast Asia) project coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiments (Southeast Asia) was established with the goal of sharing computational resources, human resources and promoting research for Southeast Asia. As soon as CORDEX-SEA was initiated, Assoc. Ngo Duc Thanh and his colleagues have embarked on research on simulating extreme temperature and precipitation factors for Southeast Asia. The study focuses on a number of climatic factors for the entire Southeast Asia region such as the number of heavy rainy days, the number of consecutive rainy or no rainy days, the number of days when the temperature is too hot or too cold … The program helped him to be named in the list of nominees for the Ta Quang Buu Award in 2021 – the project “Evaluation of the ability of the RegCM4 model to simulate the extreme indicators of rain and temperature in the CORDEX-Southeast. ASIAN”. According to Assoc. Ngo Duc Thanh, there are currently many models with different parameter configurations that can be used to calculate future climate change for the global as well as for individual regions such as Southeast Asia. However, different models will give different errors in different countries, regions, and times. During more than 4 years of implementation, Assoc. Ngo Duc Thanh and international colleagues conducted 18 simulation experiments to find the most suitable and optimal model configuration capable of representing the extreme climatic factors of rain and heat. area. 18 experiments were also ranked, from which the most optimal set of model parameters were selected, serving the long-term climate change projection until the end of the 21st century. After being announced, the work received the attention of the research community inside and outside the area. By providing the most optimal model parameters for long-term simulation experiments in Southeast Asia, the work is extremely important, helping to save significant resources and computation time. planning future climate change for the entire region. Initial research results are positive, but things have not stopped. Assoc.Prof.Dr. Ngo Duc Thanh said that, along with the results obtained, many big questions were re-opened: What is the cause of the difference in rainfall increase and decrease in different regions of the region? How do changes in the rain temperature regime affect extreme phenomena such as floods, droughts, hot weather …? However, the thing that Assoc. Ngo Duc Thanh feels most confident and confident that it is the handshake association of international scientists. Never before has the inter-country cooperation in the field been so extremely challenging as meteorology and climate change have been so closely coordinated. Talking more about the success of the project, Assoc.Prof.Dr. Thanh said: This is not only an honor for each individual scientist but also an opportunity for the field of meteorology / climate to be “quietly” and Picky learners, workers get more attention from society. Concerned about this field has not been concerned by many people, he expressed: There are very few young people interested in studying this field because this is also a challenging issue. “In recent years, each course has only recruited very few students, leading to this industry often scored relatively low, while the industry is in need of people who are good at math, physics and computer science.” In addition, during his work, he witnessed “inflows of people coming and going” in a number of hydro-meteorological research units, partly due to working conditions and inadequate income. living did not attract them. “We need the push to create a team of high-quality meteorologists that can be dedicated and passionate about the industry. That way can meet the needs of the society, solving practical and urgent problems such as forecasting natural disasters or researching climate change ”, Assoc.Prof.Dr. Thanh shared. /. The Ta Quang Buu Award is awarded annually by the Ministry of Science and Technology to honor scientists who have outstanding achievements in basic research in the fields of natural sciences and engineering. In 2021, together with TS. Bui Minh Tuan, Assoc. TS. Ngo Duc Thanh, a famous meteorologist was nominated for the “Main Award” category of this award. The Awards Ceremony is expected to be held on May 18 – Vietnam Science and Technology Day.

Research on rain forecast with a forecast term of 10 – 90 days is a topic that Dr. Bui Minh Tuan (born in 1988) cherished during his master’s years at the University of Natural Sciences. “Rain is an extremely important factor for the development of most countries in the world, including Vietnam. If the rainfall is too heavy, it can lead to flooding, causing serious damage to people and material; But too little rainfall can cause droughts, lack of water for domestic use and destroy crops. Therefore, rain forecasting is always the top concern of meteorologists in the world, ”said Tuan. Although the meteorological industry in recent years has seen a strong development; weather forecasts for 5 days have the same accuracy as the one-day forecast of 30 years ago; … however, according to Mr. Tuan, this does not mean that in the next 30 years, the forecast will be 5 times more accurate than current. “There are big obstacles that the meteorological industry has not been able to overcome. Technically, the computer can help to make forecast bulletins that come monthly or longer, however, the reliability of the forecast report will drop very quickly after 5-7 days ”, said Tuan. . Currently, the theoretical foundations for short-term forecasting (from 1-5 days) have been gradually being finalized. Therefore, the weather forecast for this time period is relatively good. However, atmospheric changes on a longer time scale (from 10 to 90 days) are not fully understood. This is also one of the main reasons why the forecast is not reliable at this time. Those concerns have prompted Mr. Tuan to find laws related to the change of rain from 10 to 90 days, towards expanding the ability to forecast. Continuously from 2013 – 2019, Mr. Tuan went to “decode” the questions: Rain in Vietnam has cyclical fluctuations, especially the 10 – 90 day cycle or not? Are these variations between climatic regions? If rain in Vietnam has a strong fluctuation in a cycle of 10 – 90 days, which large-scale processes lead to the fluctuation of these cycles?, … To answer those questions, Tuan said it took him a year to read and understand the algorithms and build computational programs for large atmospheric data sets over the course of 30 years, in the period since 1980. – 2010. “These are complex algorithms, requiring high programming skills. But due to the lack of support from IT specialists, I encountered many difficulties in handling this problem ”. After the computational results have been obtained, analyzing the physical process based on those results is also a challenge. The reason is that Vietnam’s climate is very complicated, affected by many large circulation systems and has strong differentiation between regions. The characteristics of rain and the mechanism of precipitation in Vietnam still cause a lot of controversy in the meteorological community. Therefore, the selection of important aspects for analysis also requires a lot of time. Mr. Tuan also took another year to analyze all the results. What he collected during this time helped find the oscillation pattern of rain. The physical mechanisms involved in this volatility have also been shown. In particular, he also found a relationship of this oscillation with the occurrence of heavy rains in Vietnam. This brings a lot of value, because heavy rains are considered anomalous and difficult to predict. Tuan’s research is an important theoretical basis to expand the ability to predict rain and heavy rain from 10-25 days. Thanks to these results, by early 2019, his article was published in the Journal of Climate – a climate magazine of the American Meteorological Association. Mr. Tuan is a former student of Physics at the High School of Science and Technology. Because he is always curious about natural phenomena such as storms, tornadoes, thunderstorms, … he decided to enroll in the Department of Meteorology, Hydrology and Oceanography of the University of Natural Sciences, Vietnam National University. Cabinet. “When I entered school, I found Meteorology more interesting than what I thought. The ideal knowledge of mathematics and physics is quite distant, but it is applied very closely to explain natural phenomena. In addition, I also have access to modern technologies or to process data on mainframe systems. I also had the opportunity to do internships at local observatories and to participate in professional forecasting internships at the National Center for Hydrometeorological Forecasting. There, I played the role of forecasters, directly analyzing to create a forecast newsletter. It was a very wonderful experience for me ”. After graduating from university, he continued to study for masters and doctoral degrees at the University of Science. As a scientist trained in the country, Mr. Tuan assessed that in recent years, the meteorological industry in Vietnam has also had a great development. At the working place Tuan has been equipped with a supercomputer system for training and research. The latest achievements in areas such as remote sensing, data assimilation, high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, … have also been applied in weather forecasting. However, Mr. Tuan also frankly acknowledged, the support of information technology experts to maintain and operate this system well is still limited. Current researchers still have to be in charge of this additional area. Another “separate sadness”, according to Tuan, is loneliness in science. “The computer system started to exist, but for improvement, the human factor remains the prerequisite. In Vietnam today, the number of people who choose to follow the research path in this field is very small ”. The meteorology industry still seems to be “out of the general trajectory of development”, when after nearly 10 years, despite some changes, it is still slow and only motivated by a few individual individuals. There are not many people doing research in the same field, so it is very difficult to find an academic exchange. Part of the reason, according to Tuan, is that the support for young researchers is still relatively low compared to the general level of society. This is likely to lead to a crisis of high-quality human resources in the future. Currently, each training course in the Department of Meteorology of the University of Natural Sciences recruits only about 30-40 targets. While majors require people who are good at both Math, Physics or Programming, … these people often choose very few meteorology. “Right from the source of admission, this discipline has encountered difficulties. When we enroll in schools, students still know very little about the industry and only think this industry is mainly metrology, usually for the population of C because it relates to Geography. The main registration is for aspiration 2, aspiration 3, so they don’t really like and want to stick with the industry ”, said Tuan. According to the young doctor, this industry is still not respected because people still think, “rain and wind is the story of heaven”, seemingly very far away. But in fact, it greatly affects life, economy and society such as planning production activities, forecasting diseases and preventing natural disasters. “I hope in the coming time, the society will know about the Hydrometeorology industry, not only through the image of a young man in” Quiet Sa Pa “anymore. This is an interesting discipline and offers many opportunities for young people to be truly passionate about natural sciences ”.