The annual Offshore Technology Conference (OTC) was held at Houston USA from May 6^th to 9^th 2024. The Chair of the OTC Board of Directors Alex Martineg announced the winners of the OTC Emerging Leader Award Class of 2024. Jinbo Chen, an Associate Professor from School of Ocean and Civil Engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University was one of the eleven recipients of this prestigious award.

The OTC Emerging Leader Award was presented to Professor Jinbo Chen in order to recognize him, as a raising young talent, in the field of offshore energy engineering, especially for his significant contributions and leadership in offshore structures and deepwater drilling. His contributions include research and design practice for offshore floating platforms (oil&gas and wind) anchor systems, offshore riser/pipeline and soil interactions, deepwater wells design/geohazards mitigation, and digital offshore geotechnical site investigations etc.

OTC Emerging Leader Award Program was established by OTC Board of Directors, and aims for recognizing raising talents who has less than 10 years of professional experience in offshore engineering. The selection of this award emphasizes  the candidate’s technical contributions to a specific field within offshore engineering and their professional leadership. The recipients are listed in the OTC Awards Display, a permanent awards display case in NRG Center at Houston of USA. Each professional society related to offshore engineering can nominate one candidate for this award. The eligible societies include SNAME, IEEE, ISA, ASCE, ASME, SPE, SEG, AAPG, AIChE, MTS, and TMS. Professor Chen is the sole recipient of this award from China.

Bibiography: Jinbo Chen, Tenured Associate Professor from School of Ocean and Civil Engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), China. Before joining SJTU in February 2024, he was the Offshore Geotechnical Lead of Shell Oil Company USA for semisubmersible platforms Whale and Sparta in the Gulf of Mexico and the Deepwater wells tophole specialist in Americas. He is the recipient of ASCE J. James R. Croes Medal, SNAME Best Paper Award. In addition, he is the first Chinese scholar to receive the Outstanding Young Alumnus Under 40 Award from CAEE of The University of Test at Austin. He also serves as an associate editor for the SCI journal Lithosphere responsible for geotechnical engineering.