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The State Natural Science Award is the highest award for the recognition of distinguished achievements of individuals or groups in basic research and its applications in the Natural Sciences. The presentation ceremony, held on 8 January 2008 at the People's Great Hall in Beijing, was presided by Chinese leaders including Hu Jintao, Wen Jiabao, Li Changchun, Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang.

Professor Mok's nomination by several academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences for the Award symbolizes a recognition for his significant contributions to the development of Mathematics in China in the past three decades. As early as 1980 Professor Mok was invited by the Chinese Academy of Sciences to lecture for one month on the subject of Complex Geometry. This was followed by a number of very fruitful collaborations with outstanding mathematicians from Mainland China. In 1989, Professor Mok published two articles in the flagship journal Annals of Mathematics. One of the articles, co-authored with the late Professor Jiaqing Zhong of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, was the first article (co-)authored by a Mainland mathematician to appear in Annals of Mathematics since China opened up to the world in the late seventies.

Professor Mok is delighted to have received the Award. "I am glad to see that China is attaching great importance to the Basic Sciences, and I am honoured to be able to contribute at a moment when China is making great efforts to develop the Sciences through innovation. Mathematics is of fundamental importance to the development of the Natural Sciences. Through innovations and discoveries in Mathematics, I hope to continue making contributions to the advancement of China's scientific research," he said.

Professor Mok's award-winning programme "Complex Geometry on symmetric and homogeneous spaces" is a comprehensive research programme in Pure Mathematics covering the theory of functions of Several Complex Variables, Complex Differential Geometry and Algebraic Geometry, etc. The research encompasses the subject of Classical Domains as initiated by the late distinguished Chinese mathematician Professor Loo-keng Hua, and research areas such as rational homogeneous spaces and Fano manifolds in Algebraic Geometry. Starting in the eighties Professor Mok has settled through this research programme numerous famous conjectures and open problems in Mathematics, discovering a variety of intimate relationships between curvature of complex manifolds and the geometric structures of such spaces. His work was judged on the basis of a series of research achievements attained after his return to Hong Kong in 1994 to take up the Chair Professorship position at the Department of Mathematics in HKU, including among others a series of 4 innovative articles published in the flagship journal Inventiones Mathematicae.

Professor Mok graduated from St. Paul's Co-educational College in 1975, studied overseas in the United States, and obtained his PhD in 1980 at Stanford University. He has taught at Princeton University and Columbia University in the US and Université de Paris in France before returning to Hong Kong in 1994. Since then, he has been teaching at HKU in the Department of Mathematics. Professor Mok is recognized worldwide for his achievements, having obtained the Sloan Fellowship Award and the prestigious Presidential Young Investigator Award in the US, and the renowned Croucher Award in Hong Kong for 1998/99. He has published extensively with a total of more than 60 publications arising from the research programme, including 10 articles in the flagship journals Inventiones Mathematicae and Annals of Mathematics. In 2002, Professor Mok was elected to serve on the Editorial Board of Inventiones Mathematicae. In 2004 he was invited to be a core member of the Specialist Panel for Algebraic Geometry and Complex Geometry of the International Congress of Mathematicians held in Madrid in 2006.

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