Joint PhD with Chinese Academy
20 July 2015
- for immediate release
Joint PhD with Chinese Academy
High-calibre post graduate students from China could soon be completing parts of their PhD at Lincoln, boosting an already high proportion of doctoral candidates among the student body.
The students will be from the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS), which has a graduate school of around 1000 postgraduate students at their Beijing headquarters.
The Executive Vice-President of CAAS’s graduate school, Professor Huipeng Han, and Xunqing Wang, Chief of Academic Administration Division, came to Lincoln recently to discuss with senior University management about joint PhD initiatives to further the University’s internationalisation efforts.
Lincoln Business
development manager Dr Samuel Yu says the move will
help
enhance research links with the applied work going
on at Lincoln.
“This will help New Zealand to open doors to opportunities in a big country, like China, where Kiwi ingenuity can help solve problems on a large scale.
“This also helps innovators to develop distribution channels for Kiwi techniques and technologies with close collaborators’ giving a helping hand, as establishing these relationships are valuable and important for Kiwi exporters,” Dr Yu says.
CAAS is a highly respected institute under the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture with 11,000 staff spread across 39 centres in 17 provinces in China. Its reach covers crop, plants, animal, environmental, horticultural, grass sciences and agri-tech and engineering, all of which has synergistic themes with subjects that Lincoln covers from soil to plate, Dr Yu adds.
Discussions were also held about irrigation tools with Peter Barrowclough, CEO of Lincoln Agritech, and the visitors were shown the University’s farms and the Christchurch rebuild to better understand the environment in the Canterbury region.
According to Education New Zealand (ENZ), the education sector is the 5th largest export of New Zealand and China is an important market in that segment. 8000 international students study in Christchurch, of which 25 per cent of those are from China.
Image: CAASvisit.jpg: Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and Lincoln University staff and management.
Ends