On the morning of April 13, “2020 Hebei Science and Technology Award Conference” was held in Shijiazhuang. Wang Dongfeng, Secretary of the Provincial Party Committee and Director of the Standing Committee of the Provincial People's Congress, presented the certificate to Ma Zhiying, the winner of the “2020 Hebei Provincial Science and Technology Outstanding Contribution Award”.

   Ma Zhiying is the chief expert of cotton breeding in Hebei. He led the team to overcome the problem of synchronous improvement of disease resistance and high yield, and bred a series of "disease resistance & high yield" new varieties, having explored the core technology for curing the disease of Verticillium Wilt. His team also broke through the technical bottleneck of high-quality, high-yield and multi-resistance, and bred a series of "high-quality and high-yield" new varieties, which provided strong support for improving quality and efficiency of cotton production. Since the launching of the national major science and technology special project "Grain High-yield Science and Technology Project", Ma Zhiying has undertaken the key task of Hebei project area for 15 consecutive years, led the team to break through the problems of insufficiency in light, heat&water resources and the mismatching of agricultural machinery&agronomy, and created a water-saving yet high-yield, high-efficiency technology system for wheat and corn in different ecological areas, providing practical technology for solving the problem of “water-consuming & low-yield” in grain production. Ma Zhiying presided over and completed more than 20 national, provincial or ministerial-level scientific research projects; bred 21 approved cotton varieties; obtained 24 national invention patents; published 51 SCI papers in Nature Genetics, Plant Journal, Plant Biotechnology Journal, etc; won 3 second prizes of “National Science and Technology Progress Award” as the first accomplisher, 5 first prize of science and technology at provincial or ministerial level. He also won the science and technology innovation award of “He Liang He Li Foundation”, “the Excellent Innovation Team Award of Chinese Agricultural Science and Technology”, and his team entered the first batch of “National Huang Danian Style Teacher Team”.