Professor Keqing Xia is a leading scientist in the studies of fluid turbulence and also an expert in the studies of polymer solutions near critical points. Among his many contributions to the field of turbulent thermal convection, his work in high Prandtl number heat flux measurement played a pivotal role in settling a long-standing issue in the field. His pioneering work on the statistical behavior of individual thermal plumes led to the discovery that active and passive scalars share statistically similar features, which have been praised by his peers as "important to the field of turbulence in fluids" and "shed an original light on Rayleigh-Benard convection problem". In the field of polymer solutions, a series of high precision measurements of the critical properties of polymer solutions near their critical points by his group has established scaling laws and resolved several long-standing disputes about the exact values of the associated exponents and the relations among them. The results are now benchmark data sets against which various theoretical models are tested.

　　Professor Xia obtained his B.Sc. degree in physics from Lanzhou University in 1981. He went to the US in the same year to pursue graduate study under the sponsorship of the China-US Physics Examination and Admission (CUSPEA) programme. He received his M.Sc. degree in physics in 1983 and PhD degree in physics in 1987, both from the University of Pittsburgh. He then conducted postdoctoral research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1987-1989) and Cornell University (1989-1992). Professor Xia joined The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1992 as Lecturer in the Physics Department and was promoted to Professor in 2002.

　　Professor Xia has published over 50 papers in leading international referred journals and has been invited to deliver over 30 lectures and invited talks at international conferences. His research work has won him the Science and Technology Award of the Chinese Higher Education Institutions (Second Class) in 2001 from the State Education Commission of China.

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