Huiwen Gong was awarded the Peter Meusburger Doctoral Prize ‘Geography and Knowledge’ on December 4, 2020. The award ceremony was held in a videoconference attended by former students and relatives of Peter Meusburger, colleagues from Heidelberg University and Robert Hassink who supervised the awarded PhD thesis.

Huiwen Gong received her PhD from Kiel University for her cumulative dissertation entitled ‘Structure and agency in local path development: A comparative study of the online games industry in Shanghai and Hamburg’. With her excellent dissertation, Huiwen Gong has provided new impulses and valuable suggestions for integrated research in economic geography and geographies of knowledge. Huiwen Gong has an impressive CV that demonstrates academic excellence combined with international mobility and interdisciplinary research.

In her PhD thesis Huiwen Gong analyzes the local path development of the online game industry in the urban regions of Shanghai and Hamburg – two different economic settings which are organized in particular forms and structured in particular ways. Huiwen Gong’s cumulative dissertation consists of five journal articles that are reflected in a framing text. Her work is an outstanding research achievement that is compelling from both a theoretical and empirical perspective. She gives new insights into the legitimacy of the contested online gambling industry, the analysis of institutional responses from a multi-scalar perspective, and the comparison of two case studies taking into account national institutional structures to explain existing differences in resource formation processes.