Dr Hongwu Ma ppointed as the executive director of the Edinburgh -Tianjin Joint Research Centre for Systems Biology and Synthetic Biology (ETSSB)

Dr Hongwu Ma from the University of Edinburgh has visited Tianjin University in November 2007 together with Prof. Igor Goryanin, Director of the Edinburgh Centre for Bioinformatics and Prof. Colin Adams, Director of commercialization of the School of Informatics. During the visit, they officially opened the Edinburgh -Tianjin Joint Research Centre for Systems Biology and Synthetic Biology (ETSSB) for facilitating the research and education collaboration between the two universities. Dr Ma was appointed as the executive director of the joint research centre. As the first step, several MSc students have been selected to work on collaborating projects and 1 or 2 Ph.D students will go to the University of Edinburgh for Joint Ph.D study next year with scholarship support from the China Scholarships Council. They also met GONG Ke, President of Tianjin University during the visit.