On May 28, a delegation of the Henry Samueli School of Engineering, University of California, Irvine (UCL) visited the College of Engineering (COE), Peking University to discuss cooperation possibilities in student and faculty exchange, research collaboration, and international education programs.

The delegation included Professor Gregory Washington, dean of the Henry Samueli School of Engineering, Professor William C. Tang, associate dean for research, and Dr. Lily Wu, director of academic innovation, programs. Professor Dongxiao Zhang, executive vice dean of COE, Professor Ray Han, assistant dean for global education, and Professor Jianzhong Xi of Department of Biomedical Engineering attended the meeting.

Zhang made a detailed introduction to COE’s history, departments, faculty, research areas, and students composition. He pointed out that as COE adopts a tenure-track policy to attract the top faculty from the world, many of our professors have international education and work background, which lays a good foundation for international cooperation.

“International student programs and exchanges in COE has been on steady rise in recent years,” Zhang said, “As the two schools share many similar programs such as biomedical engineering, materials science, and aerospace engineering, there exists great potential and broad prospects for cooperation.”

Han introduced two innovative student exchange programs that are gaining popularity in COE -the Global Educational Exchange Program and Capstone Design Program. The Global Educational Exchange (Globex) Program, which was carried out since last summer, is a two-way student exchange program that has involved a dozen of universities by now. The number of students signed up for Globex this summer has increased from 30 last year to 60. Meanwhile, the Capstone Design program in collaborative with Stanford University, National University of Singapore and the University of Toronto, allows students from different universities to work in teams on industry-sourced projects. Some of the sponsoring companies included Siemens, Schlumberger, Schneider Electric, and Boeing.

UCI was very interested in the two programs, and discussed detailed issues such as courses arrangement, credits, expenses and faculty instructors. As UCI has a strong biomedical program, they also discussed with Xi about student exchange program with the Department of Biomedical Engineering. On the foundation of existing MOU between Peking University and University of California, the two engineering schools agreed to push further the collaboration.