Zhou Ming-Zhen

Who was Zhou Ming-Zhen?

Zhou Mingzhen 周明镇, also known as Minchen M. Chow, and as "Ming" by his close foreign friends, was a pioneering Chinese paleomammalogist and vertebrate paleontologist. He was an Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, where he was a research professor for mammalian paleontology in the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing.

Zhou Mingzhen was born in Shanghai, China, and graduated from Chongqing University in Sichuan in 1943. He received an MSc degree from the University of Miami, USA in 1948 and a Ph.D. degree from Lehigh University, USA in 1950. He became an associate professor at Shandong University in 1952 and joined the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing where he remained until his death in 1996. He was the Chinese leader of the "Sino-Soviet Expedition" to northwestern China in 1959–1960. In 1979, Zhou became an Honorary Member of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. He became an Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1980 and in 1993 was awarded the SVP's Romer-Simpson Medal for "sustained and outstanding scholarly excellence and service to the discipline of vertebrate paleontology". He was an early and effective advocate of cladistic approaches to paleobiology in China beginning in the early 1980s and promoted study abroad and academic training for young Chinese paleontologists in the 1980s and 1990s.