Last week CHEMMAT staff member, Dr Wei Yu returned from China after he and fellow CHEMMAT staff member, Prof Brent Young, visited China to meet with several successful CHEMMAT alumni, both students and staff.
Brent with PhD student Beichen Zhao first visited TJX Bioengineering LLC in Shanghai (tjxbio.com), whose CEO, Dr. “Bruce” X. Lee, is a doctoral alumnus from UoA (photo above). TJXBIO is the international division of T&J Bioengineering (Shanghai) Co Ltd T&J has over a decade of expertise in designing and manufacturing mini- and micro-scale high-throughput parallel bioreactors for both microbial fermentation and cell culture. TJX is supporting Beichen’s PhD research, and he is spending two months in Shanghai on experimental work in their labs. After a short (45min), high-speed (300km/h) train journey, Wei with Brent and Beichen and BE alumnus A/Prof David Wilson (AUT/I2C2), then visited the School of Food Science and Technology, Jiangnan University. There they visited doctoral alumnus Dr Haohan Ding and gave a talk on “Walking the tightrope between theory and practice: lessons learned from 12+ years digitalisation practice in the dairy industry”. Ding is a current collaborator with Wei, David, and Brent on a China Strategic Research Area grant in Food Process Digitalisation, and Jiangnan University is now inviting them to join the “111 Plan” Innovation and Intelligence Base in Food Safety Processing Science and Technology as overseas experts to support future collaborative activities.
The following day, Brent, Beichen David and Ding visited staff alumnus Prof Xiao Dong Chen (photo above), at his Company Yijian Instrument and Equipment (Suzhou) Co Ltd, (https://smartdongest.com/), and the School of Chemical and Environmental Engineering he founded at Suzhou University. Yijian Instrument and Equipment (Suzhou) successfully produces bionic models of the mouth, stomach, and colon for the replacement of human testing, including infants, and animal testing, including rats, cats, and dogs. After a 5-hour high-speed train journey from Wuxie to Beijing, Wei, David, Brent, and Beichen attended the World Congress of Chemical Engineering (wcce12.com) along with Wei’s PhD students Jiani Hu and Neil Wang. In addition to delivering papers, including an invited keynote on “A Digital Twin Platform for Decarbonisation of Industrial Process Heat and Flexibilization”, they met doctoral alumni A/Prof Bing Li, Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, and Dr Shoulong Dong, Beijing Institute of Technology (middle photo).