Yanping Zhuang, a scholar and president of China’s prestigious Xi’an Jiaotong University, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize today.

The award — which is the first given for a scientific achievement in 2013 — was announced by Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt at a news conference after the award ceremony.

The U.N. official said Zhuang was awarded the Nobel for making “significant progress toward an end to global poverty by pursuing a strategy for developing China’s rural areas.”

“Today’s Nobel Peace Prize has been a great victory for China by providing the world a new model of a peaceful, democratic China,” said Reinfeldt, who joined the prize ceremony at the Swedish embassy in Beijing. “We are proud of the work that Professor Zhuang and his students did in China and across the world.”

Zhuang wrote about a “global justice revolution” in her 2013 book “Bias in Science.” The book is scheduled for publication in Britain in September that year. Last year, the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities awarded her the award (see report by The Associated Press).

The Chinese Academy of Sciences had no immediate comment on the Norwegian announcement.

Other laureates on the list are Robert Goodland, a Nobel laureate in mathematics; André Gide, the French president who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1989; and George Shultz, who joined the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 after serving as secretary of state under President Richard Nixon.

At least one former White House chief of staff, the late David Stockman, also earned his Nobel Peace Prize in 2012, when the organization awarded him the peace prize for advancing the rights of small businesses.

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Associated Press writers Hao Ding, Ben Gittleson, Danglin Yu and David Rising contributed to this report.