December 15, 2009 The delegation from North Rhine-Westphalia NRW Germany, headed by Andreas Pinkwart, NRW s Minister for Innovation Science, Research and Technology, paid a visit to Huazhong University of Science & Technology HUST on Nov. 19. President Li Peigen met with the delegation and held a friendly discussion with Andreas Pinkwart.
President Li gave the delegation an overview of HUST, its strong academic traditions and its collaborations with Germany. He said that Wuhan, an industrial base and a rising city in central China, boasts of abundant scientific and educational resources and is home to HUST, a national key university in south central China.
The Tongji Medical College of HUST has been maintaining a close contact with German universities for years. HUST hopes to extend collaborations on top of medicine with Germany to other fields like engineering, he said. President Li also introduced HUST s research developments in new energy, bio-medicine and nanotechnology and expressed his wish for international cooperation in these fields.
Andreas Pinkwart outlined NRW s industrial strength and scientific studies carried out by prestigious universities in Germany. He said that there is huge potential for deepening cooperation between the two sides. He hoped that cultural exchanges between young researchers should be promoted apart from scientific cooperation. He also made a point of strengthening research collaboration in aging society.
The meeting was followed by the launching ceremony for China-Germany Interdisciplinary Project SFB/ Transregio 60 and the signing ceremony for Memorandum between the Pulsed High Magnetic Filed Center HUST PHMFC and Center for Nanointegration Duisburg-Essen CeNIDE . The SFB/ Transregio 60 Project 2009-2013 Mutual interaction of viruses with cells of the immune systems: from fundamental research to immunotherapy and vaccination , jointly applied for by Prof.
Yang Dongliang, director of Clinical Immunology Laboratory of Tongji Hospital attached to Tongji Medical College, and Prof. Roggendorf with the Institute of Virology was approved by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG and awarded 5,100,000 euros from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.
The collaboration between PHMFC and CeNIDE began in July 2009, when Prof. Li Liang visited CeNIDE upon invitation. Through the communication with Prof Michael Farle, director of CeNIDE, both believed that the two centers are strongly complementary in scientific research and education, and therefore agreed to carry out cooperation in such fields.
Prof. Farle also suggested signing a cooperation agreement with PHMFC. The two centers will, as the first formal step in the win-win cooperation, conduct research in nanophase materials under extreme conditions. CeNIDE will offer advanced sample materials while PHMFC provide pulsed high magnetic experimental conditions for the joint research.
They will also cooperate with each other in education and applying for international research projects.
As the last item on the agenda an alumni meeting was held between the delegation and the Tongji Medical College staff who ever studied in Germany, including a number of senior professors and leaders.
Members of the NRW delegation are presidents and professors from prestigious universities including RWTH Aachen University, Ruhr University Bochum, University of COLOGNE, Dortmund University of Technology, University of D sseldorf, University of Duisburg-Essen and University of Siegen.
