Zhang Linfeng of DP Technology Named Elsevier 2024 Highly Cited Chinese Researcher and MIT Technology Review AI100 Young Pioneer

For years, the list has been dedicated to systematically showcasing the current distribution of talent in China's scientific research field, bringing scholars with outstanding performance in more regionally distinctive sub-disciplines into the spotlight. Among the scholars featured on this year’s list, only 2.3% have been engaged in research for 1-10 years, while the proportion of scholars with 11-20 years of research experience surged to 26.7%. It is reported that this year, the list observed scholar metrics from multiple dimensions and refined the methodology for determining scholars' disciplinary affiliations. The overall selection criteria remained unchanged. The list evaluates the research output of Chinese scholars based on the following conditions: authors whose research works are included in Scopus with their affiliated institutions located in mainland China, and whose current place of employment is also in China, including non-Chinese nationals and non-Chinese ethnic scholars; only research works where these scholars are listed as either the first or corresponding author are counted. Scholars must meet several requirements to be included, such as having more than one document indexed (excluding single publications) and at least one document ranked in the top 1% globally for citations.

In the same week, at the "Zhongguan Village Forum - Future AI Pioneer Forum," DeepTech and MIT Technology Review officially released“AI100 Youth Pioneer”List. DP Technology Founder and Chief Scientist Linfeng Zhang Receives Another Honor, Selected for This Talent Program.

Since 2022, the wave of artificial intelligence has surged rapidly. Looking at the world's top AI technical teams, Chinese scientists and engineers have played a pivotal role, demonstrating the global influence of Chinese research talents in AI fundamental theoretical innovation and engineering practice. Against this backdrop, MIT Technology Review and DeepTech have developed a three-dimensional evaluation method encompassing "talent-technology-industry" to identify young Chinese AI forces making significant contributions in both industry and academia. They have gathered young pioneers under the age of 40 and released the "AI100 Young Pioneers," amplifying the strong voice of China's AI talent.

This selection invited more than 20 experts in the fields of computer science and robotics to serve as review advisors. Through expert nominations and evaluations by the review advisors, and with the knowledge and consent of the candidates, young pioneer representatives engaged in artificial intelligence within China were selected based on comprehensive considerations of technological innovation, industrial implementation, industry impact, interdisciplinary exploration, and social responsibility.

Zhang Linfeng is a leading figure in the interdisciplinary field of AI and science. He successively obtained a Bachelor of Science degree from Peking University and a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from Princeton University. Linfeng has long been committed to research in the interdisciplinary field of AI for Science, achieving abundant results in machine learning, computational physical chemistry, materials, and drug design, with his research achievements repeatedly breaking through disciplinary boundaries. He led the development ofDeep Potential (DeePMD)Algorithm, increasing the efficiency of molecular dynamics simulations a thousandfold, solving the "dimensionality curse" of traditional quantum mechanics calculations, and winning the highest award in the field of high-performance computing in 2020.Gordon Bell Prize. This achievement was evaluated by Nature as a "milestone in computational science" and selected as one of "China's Top Ten Scientific and Technological Advances." Currently, Zhang Linfeng has published nearly a hundred papers in top journals such as Nature and Science, with citations exceeding ten thousand. He has been consecutively listed among the "Top 2% of Global Scientists" by Stanford University for three years. In March 2025, Zhang Linfeng, together with collaborators, released Uni-3DAR——A framework that unifies the generation and understanding of 3D structures through an autoregressive next-token prediction task. Uni-3DAR uses autoregression to unify the microscopic and macroscopic 3D world, with performance exceeding diffusion models by 256% and inference speed 21.8 times faster. It is the world's first scientific large model of its kind.

As both a scientist and entrepreneur, Zhang Linfeng founded DP Technology in 2018 to drive the transformation of microscale industrial design through the new paradigm of "multiscale modeling + machine learning + high-performance computing." The company has developed...Hermite® Drug Computing Design Platform, RiDYMO® High-Quality Hit Discovery Platform, and Piloteye® Energy Battery R&D SolutionAndBohr Scientific Research Space Station, has served more than 200 top research teams worldwide, assisted in the publication of thousands of papers, and collaborated with industry-leading companies such as Yunnan Baiyao, Dongyangguang, CATL, and GAC Aion to accelerate the R&D process of new drugs and new energy materials. Lin Feng leads theOpen Source Community DeepModelingAnd Pre-trained Large ModelsDPA(Hailed as "the GPT of the scientific community"), DP Technology has built an independent and controllable AI scientific infrastructure, covering nearly 70 elements of the periodic table, becoming a core engine for materials and drug design. Under the leadership of Lin Feng, DP Technology has deeply cultivated AI for Science, continuously building and improving microscale industrial infrastructure, not only breaking the monopoly of overseas industrial software ecosystems but also promoting China's AI science to transform from a "tool user" to a "rule maker" through a model of "technical breakthrough + industrial implementation."

"AI is reshaping the paradigm of scientific research," said Zhang Linfeng. "Our goal is to start from the atomic scale and build a new generation of scientific infrastructure, enabling China to occupy a core position in the global innovation chain." This vision is gradually being realized through the technological breakthroughs and ecosystem co-construction of DP Technology.