Sir Keith Burnett, president and vice-chancellor of the University of Sheffield (
www.sheffield.ac.uk), made a three-day visit to Beijing earlier this month to build on partnership opportunities between the UK and China.
He had a meeting with Jianhua Lin — the president of Peking University — to discuss collaboration, particularly on new materials that will be crucial for the hybrid and fully electric cars essential to reducing pollution in China’s cities.
He also met with members of the Chinese government ministry responsible for research and industrial collaboration, and he held discussions with long-standing university partners from Beijing and Nanjing.
Sir Keith said: “Like the UK, China is committed to innovation and moving on from being a low-wage economy. There are tremendous opportunities for us to innovate together and develop new products in areas such as next-generation vehicles.
“We are looking forward to hosting senior visits from both Beijing and Nanjing over the next couple of months and developing even stronger partnerships in such key areas as advanced manufacturing, engineering and science.”
The University of Sheffield is already working on a wide range of projects in China, including some with the Shanghai Academy of Space Technology.
The university’s Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre is focusing on lightweight high-performance materials — the same area of advanced manufacturing and materials that will be crucial to next-generation electric vehicles and also underpins the university’s research relationship with McLaren super-cars.