2019 Top 10 Outstanding Chinese America Youth name list unveiled

The 12th “Top Ten Outstanding Chinese American Youth Awards” selection hosted by the All America Chinese Youth Federation, the American Chinese Public Diplomacy Association, and the “Los Angeles Post” were officially announced on May 4. Nathan Chen, Lauren Yee, Hao Sun, Feng Liu, Jason Gui, KaUn Lao, Anson Chen, Yun Xie, Yang Deng, and Shirley Chen were honored on this year’s list.

The award organizers said that this year marks the 100th anniversary of the May Fourth Movement. Chinese youth and international students are the most dynamic, influential and mission-oriented groups in inheriting the spirit of the May Fourth Movement, continuing innovation and cultural traditions. The theme of this year’s selection campaign is: “Inheritance and Innovation.”

This year’s top ten outstanding Chinese youths are widely represented. Nathan Chen, Lauren Yee, Shirley Chen, who were born and grew up in the United States, and Anson Chen from Taiwan and KaUn Lao from Macau. There is also Deng Yang (Hui) of Chinese ethnic minorities. The winners have outstanding performances in different sectors such as sports, culture, academic research, entrepreneurship, educational services, film, public welfare, and model student.

They are outstanding representatives of the millions of Chinese youth and Chinese international students in the United States. Their efforts to work hard and grow up will certainly be the driving force for inspiring young friends. Their character and achievements show the qualities of contemporary Chinese youth leaders and future social leaders.

The selection of the Top Ten Outstanding Young People Awards in the United States has become a selection activity from the most popular Chinese community in the American-Chinese community during the Asian-Pacific Asian Heritage Month in May each year, showing the outstanding style and brand-new image of the new generation of Chinese.

Nathan Chen, figure skater. Yale University student. He won two world championships in the 2018 and 2019 and the three-time US Championship in 2017-2019. The bronze medal of the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics team competition. Known as the “King of the Four Jumps”, Chen is currently the only man in the world who can make five kinds of jumps. Chen was the first player to complete five rounds of jumping in the long program in the official competition of the International Flower Sliding League. It was called the “May 4 Youth” by Chinese ice fans. In 2018, he set an Olympic record in Pyeongchang and became the first player to challenge six difficult four-round jumps in a single program, rewriting the highest technical score in the history of men’s figure skating. In the past two seasons, Chen has won the first place in the world with 12 wins and 11 wins. He ranked first in the world and ranked first in the world (three years in total).

Lauren Yee, playwright, was born in San Francisco and descended from Taishan of Guangdong. She graduated from Yale University and then the University of California, San Diego. Her masterpieces include “King of the Yees”, ” The Hatmaker’s Wife”, “The Great Leap”, etc., 2019’s new work “The Song of Summer”. Among them, ” King of the Yees ” uses the traditional overseas Chinese community of his father to participate in the interpretation of the relationship between the father and the daughter, leading the audience through the barriers of culture, the country and the family, and the journey of discovering self and cultural heritage. Her work takes place at mainstream theaters in Broadway, San Francisco, Berkeley, Chicago, and Minneapolis. Many mainstream media such as The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times have commented and exclusive interviews on her plays. Different awards are awarded each year. In 2019, he won the annual Literature award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Hao Sun is an Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northeastern University (Boston, MA) and a Research Affiliate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University and did his Postdoc training at MIT. His research focuses on the advancement of scientific knowledge and the development of innovative sensing and data analytics to tackle built environment issues, specifically to address the resilience, sustainability, and safety issues of civil infrastructure systems. His specific interests include smart and resilient infrastructure; advanced sensing, big data analytics, machine learning, uncertainty quantification and inverse computational mechanics, for structural health monitoring and resilience assessment; physics-informed AI for engineering applications. Dr. Sun has co-authored over twenty peer-reviewed articles published in top-tiered journals. His work has been widely reported in various national and international major media coverages over 40 times, including MIT News, Fox News, ASCE Civil Engineering Magazine, Science Daily, etc. He was also invited to give seminars on my scholarly work at top universities such as MIT, California Institute of Technology (Caltech), University of California–Berkeley, University of Virginia, among many others. In recognition of his achievement, Dr. Sun was named to the 2018 Forbes “30 Under 30”: Science, a list of the world’s most inspiring young innovators, bright rising stars and the leaders of tomorrow who are transforming the world.

Feng (David) Liu is currently the chairman of the HETU Education Group，the Founder and CEO of Usstudent.com and Gravitee. . Graduated from the Carlson School of Business at the University of Minnesota in the United States, the HETU International Summer Education Platform has been saving a huge amount of tuition for the eight years since its inception. During his time at the University, he became the first Chinese to enter the TKE Centennial Brotherhood in the history of the University of Minnesota. Nowadays, new gravity clubs have been established in universities such as Oxford University, Columbia University, Boston University, etc., and follow the three principles of “pursuing excellence”, “seeking help” and “helping others” to encourage people with common goals to move forward together. We will gather each high-quality force into a tower and strive to incite the development of high-quality youth gear. So far, new gravity clubs have been established in 23 overseas famous schools. The number of members in each school has exceeded 100, and cooperation with more than 200 companies has been provided to provide the most accurate resource docking. He was listed on the AACYF “30 Under 30” of 2018. 

Jason Gui is the founder of Vigo Technologies, known for its two products: Vue, a pair of stylish smart glasses built for everyday use, and Vigo, a Bluetooth headset that helps drivers stay alert while driving. Vue raised over $2.2 million on Kickstarter, and sold $4 million in its first year of launch, becoming the top eyewear campaign of all time. Jason holds degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Marketing and Operations Management from the Wharton School. Prior to Vigo he founded Three Fellows, a video company producing shows that portrayed the lives of international students in the US that garnered tens of millions of views and partnerships with major TV stations such as CCTV and Phoenix TV, and Xinci.so, the Chinese Urban Dictionary. Jason is also a well-known blogger in China with readership of over half a million. He has lived in China, New Zealand, Australia and now resides in San Francisco. Jason was named on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list and MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35 Asia Pacific list. 

Ka Un Lao is currently a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Cornell University and will join the Department of Chemistry at Virginia Commonwealth University as an Assistant Professor in the coming August. He was born in Macau and received B.S. degrees with a major in chemistry and a minor in Physics from National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. He received a Ph.D. in physical/theoretical chemistry from The Ohio State University. His research interests are broadly related to electronic structure theory, quantum chemistry, and noncovalent covalent interactions ranging from small molecules to large, condensed phase systems, and from methods development to applications. His academic research activities to date have resulted in numerous presentations at professional conferences and 27 peer-reviewed publications including high impact journals such as Science, Physical Review Letters, Nature Communications, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, with over 1800 citations and an Hindex of 19. Two of his publications were featured on the cover of The Journal of Physical Chemistry A and The Journal of Chemical Physics, respectively. In addition, The Journal of Chemical Physics selected his paper as an annual “Editors’ Choice”. Furthermore, he obtained many awards due to his outstanding performance including the prestigious and highly competitive 2018 ACS COMP Division Wiley Computers in Chemistry Outstanding Postdoc Award and 2015 ACS COMP Division Chemical Computing Group Excellence Award for Graduate Students which recognize excellence in Theoretical and Computational Chemistry research at each American Chemical Society (ACS) National Meeting by the ACS Division of Computers in Chemistry (COMP). 

Anson Chen, actor, debuted in Taiwan, has worked on a variety of shows and cooperated with many super stars. However, in the fast-growing period, he chose to go to the United States for further improvement in order to break through the self and find a more international platform. During his studies in the United States, Anson was invited to return to China to participate in advertising endorsements, participating in TV dramas, movies and other works. In the past two years, he has actively participated in the planning and activities of the Asian International Film Festival, promoting the exchange of Asian national films in the international film market. Anson also has his own plans for music, and is preparing to cooperate with Emmy winner Wang Zongxian to record his own single. Anson’s new online drama “Lost 1/2” with Fox and Tencent will be launched in the near future. Other works include the online drama “The Temptation of Plastic Surgery”, the movie “The Ugly Man Turns Over”, “The Left Female Bodyguard”.

Yun Xie, film director, screenwriter, master of drama director of Shanghai Theatre Academy, graduated from the film director of the School of Visual Arts in New York. She used to be a performance department teacher at Zhejiang Media College, a host of Shanghai TV programs and radio stations, and a new advertising director in the industry. she has co-wrote with the Oscar-winning screenwriter Alexander Dinelaris and directed the short film The Still Life, which won many international film festival awards including the Houston International Film Festival Short Film Award. In 2017, she wrote and directed the first film feature film Truth or Dare, and won the Schengcheng International Film Festival Honorary Feature Film Award. The film was successfully released in China in 2018. In 2018, Xie Yun became the first signing director of Narval Films. In the future, Xie Yun will continue to be a female director and win a place for Chinese filmmakers in the international film market; for a later overseas Chinese, develop a better cultural environment.

Yang Deng graduated from the University of Southern California with a degree in Transportation Engineering, he was the “30 Under 30” of AACYF.

In 2015, Yang established the “Yang Deng Scholarship” to provide a relatively comprehensive and equal educational resource and information platform for Chinese students. Yang came to the US in 2015, after that he established the FYPO which is an organization has a clearer goal to serve more students. The mission of both his scholarship and FYPO is designed to accurately contribute to balance educational resource allocation. In 2017, Yang co-established the “SEA” in Los Angeles, which includes a number of social entrepreneurs, practitioners, and professionals in the field of social enterprise innovation. SEA provides social entrepreneurs and educators, who are in the Southern California region, a pure, efficient and diversified communication platform. SEA not only invite speakers from different fields to conduct salons activities but also provides consulting services for social enterprise innovation for students at the University of Southern California, UCLA Pepperdine, and so on. Yang worked and assisted a number of non-profit organizations when he studied at USC and continued to seek effective and sustainable solutions to solve social problems.

Shirley Chen is a freshman at Harvard University. Shirley Chen has a wide range of hobbies. In high school, in addition to her high academic achievement, she also participated in the shooting of many advertisements, movies, and TV series, and broadcasted on ABC, NBC, Disney XD and other media. In her spare time, she also founded the “Ai-ya” online magazine (http://aiyamag.com), which she designed, wrote, photographed and interviewed. She wanted to give confidence and encouragement to the girls from different cultures who are in the same age as her and other minority women through arts. In September 2018, she was cast in the historic Hasty Pudding Theatricals at Harvard University. As the only freshman female out of six females cast, she helped change Harvard history, ending nearly 200 years of All-Male performance in the 12-person cast! Since then, Shirley Chen and other five girls’ names will be one the Harvard’s name list. In the future, she hopes to become both an actor and a creator, who uses their platform to create meaningful and refreshing media that provides minorities，particularly Asian-Americans with the chance to tell their stories on a mainstream platform.