On the morning of June 22, 2016, Mr. Ma Xingrui, Deputy Secretary of the CPC Guangdong Provincial Committee and Secretary of the CPC Shenzhen Municipal Committee, met with Prof. Robert H. Grubbs from California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Prof. Grubbs is the 2005 Nobel Laureate in chemistry who came to SUSTech to attend the 5th Grubbs Symposium.
Mr. Ma was delighted to meet with Prof. Grubbs again. Actually on November 18, 2015, during his visit to Shenzhen, Prof. Grubbs was once invited to meet with Mr. Ma and they had a nice talk about future cooperation.
During this year’s meeting, Mr. Ma spoke highly of the successful holding of the 5th Grubbs Symposium in SUSTech from June 20 to 21. He said that the symposium attracted many top experts and scholars in this filed, which contributed a lot to expand SUSTech’s influence and promote its discipline development. Then he promised that the CPC Shenzhen Municipal Committee and Shenzhen Municipal People’s Government would continue to support SUSTech on its way to become a world-class university.
Ma Xingrui believed that the building of the Shenzhen Grubbs Research Institute with SUSTech as its base was of great significance. On the one hand, an institute headed by a Nobel Laureate would rapidly attract a large number of top scientists. On the other hand, the building of the Institute would help SUSTech develop its own specialties based on chemistry, material science, energy and medicine. ’Moreover, combined with Shenzhen’s favorable environment for entrepreneurship, the technological findings in these disciplines could quickly be put into practice, thus promoting Shenzhen’s industrial restructuring and upgrading as well as its social and economic development. And Mr. Ma said that Shenzhen government would provide various resources to support the cooperation between Prof. Grubbs and SUSTech.
Prof. Grubbs expressed his thanks to Ma Xingrui for the warm reception, and spoke highly of the fast development of SUSTech and Shenzhen in the past half year. During this visit to SUSTech, he remarked that the University now has more well-equipped labs, more eminent professors and more excellent students. SUSTech is such a dynamic university free from restrictions confronted by other colleges and universities that it can build itself with the highest standards of disciplines. That’s what SUSTech attracts him the most, Prof. Grubbs said. And he would spare no efforts to help it seek for a better future.
President Chen Shiyi thanked the CPC Shenzhen Municipal Committee and Shenzhen Municipal People’s Government for their support for SUSTech and the establishment of Grubbs Research Institute. He said that according to the Memorandum of Grubbs Research Institute Cooperation signed on June 20, SUSTech and Prof. Grubbs will work together to build the Institute into a world-class scientific research center for new medicines, new materials and new energy. Prof. Grubbs who acts as the Director of Academic Advisory Committee of Department of Chemistry in SUSTech will help the University introduce more elite professionals to the Institute to promote fundamental researches and industrial development in related areas. Now SUSTech has made a preliminary plan for establishing the Institute.
Other people presented at the meeting were officials from the Shenzhen Municipal People’s Government, Vice President of SUSTech Tang Tao, Prof. James P. Collman of Stanford University and other professionals.
