Zhu Xiaoxiang, a Chinese researcher, was among the 10 winners of the 2015 Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize, the most important award for early-career scientific researchers in Germany, at a ceremony in Berlin on Tuesday.

The Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize has been awarded annually since 1977 by the German Research Foundation to outstanding researchers as both recognition and an incentive to continue pursuing a path of academic and scientific excellence.

The prize, named after the atomic physicist and former foundation president, is regarded as the third-most important science prize in Germany, after the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, also awarded by the foundation, and the German Future Prize, awarded by Germany's president.

Zhu, a 30-year-old honorary professor at the Technical University of Munich, was honored for her research on Earth observation. She plans to optimize remote sensing data and provide the foundations needed to design new satellite sensors, the foundation said.

As a group leader at the German Aerospace Center, she develops modern signal processing methods by reconstructing poor signal strengths to improve resolution, reducing noise using nonlocal filters or reconstructing objects using mathematical models.

"It's a golden era for Earth observation," Zhu said. "I'd like to make contributions to promoting scientific cooperation between Germany and China in this area."