On 24 October, GDUT held a symposium on the development of its chemical engineering discipline and on the cultivation of chemical engineering talent at the Higher Education Center Campus. Qiu Xueqing, President of GDUT, and Yu Lin, Vice President, attended the event. Thirty-five experts from renowned universities, research institutes and enterprises gathered for the occasion, including Tsinghua University, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Fudan University, Sun Yat-sen University, Nankai University, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Chongqing University, Xiamen University, South China University of Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, the Guangdong Institute of Corrosion Science and Technology Innovation, and Yingde Gases Group.
Focusing on meeting major national strategic needs and on building high-end industrial clusters for green petrochemicals and advanced materials in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, the experts offered advice and suggestions on further strengthening GDUT's chemical engineering discipline and improving the quality of its chemical engineering talent cultivation.
President Qiu delivered a speech at the opening ceremony. He noted that, under the strategic impetus of the carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals, green chemical engineering has become an important force in driving the transformation and upgrading of the industry and in helping to achieve carbon neutrality. In recent years, he said, GDUT's chemical engineering discipline has gained strong momentum: it was rated B+ in the Ministry of Education's discipline evaluation, ranked 21st in the ShanghaiRanking discipline rankings, and was included in the list of China's first-class disciplines. He stressed that GDUT will continue to aim at cultivating high-calibre chemical engineering professionals and to build a full-chain innovation system extending from source innovation to industrialisation, and expressed the hope that this symposium would enable extensive and in-depth exchange and cooperation with the experts, so that together the two sides can advance the development of the discipline and contribute more to the high-quality development of Guangdong Province and the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.
The head of the School of Chemical Engineering and Light Industry presented an overview of GDUT's development and of the state of its chemical engineering discipline and talent cultivation. He noted that chemical engineering is a discipline of longstanding strength at GDUT: drawing on Guangdong's resource advantages in petrochemicals and biomass, the discipline focuses on key technologies such as the green substitution of petrochemical feedstocks, cleaner production in petrochemical processes, and the high-value utilisation of mid- and downstream products, and has gradually formed distinctive research directions in biomass chemical engineering, fine chemicals, polymer materials and new-energy chemical engineering. The School, he said, will continue to work for the high-quality development of the discipline and for the cultivation of chemical engineering talent.
