Harbin Institute of Technology

Written by: Liu Peixiang
Translated by: Yu Shuangshuang
Edited by: William Mosteller
Date: 2-28

On the morning of February 26, the Polar Academy, Harbin Institute of Technology (PA-HIT) and the UArctic-HIT Training Center (UArctic-HIT-TC) were inaugurated in the auditorium of the university museum. President Zhou Yu met with Mr. Lars Kullerud, President of the University of the Arctic (UArctic), Mr. Outi Snallman, Vice President of UArctic, and Ms. Riitta Rissanen, President of Lapland University of Applied Sciences, to sign cooperation agreements on the development of the UArctic-HIT Training Center.

During the meeting, President Zhou Yu expressed his hope that the two sides would make joint efforts to achieve further cooperation and closer communication, so as to make contributions to the development of the regional economy and national strategy. He also hoped that the UArctic-HIT Training Center would play an active role in providing better support for UArctic through the leverage of our outstanding relevant disciplines.

Zhang Wanping, Member of the Standing Committee of the Municipal Party Committee and deputy mayor of Harbin; Shi Zhaohui, Deputy Director General of the Department of Science and Technology of Heilongjiang Province; Lars Kullerud; and Xiong Sihao, Executive Deputy Secretary of the school Party Committee delivered speeches at the unveiling ceremony. Provincial and municipal leaders, such as Yang Yudong, Director of the Heilongjiang Meteorological Bureau, and Li Zhijie, Director of Harbin Science and Technology Bureau, attended the unveiling ceremony. Ren Nanqi, Vice President and Dean of the Polar Academy, presided over the inauguration ceremony.

The leaders jointly unveiled the Polar Academy, as well as the UArctic-HIT Training Center, and conferred letters of appointment to experts of the PA academic committee. Academician Zhao Yufen of the Chinese Academy of Sciences delivered a speech on behalf of the experts of the academic committee. Li Yifan, chief scientist of the PA-HIT and director of the UArctic-HIT Training Center, gave an overall briefing on the PA-HIT and UArctic-HIT Training Center.

It is believed that the North and South poles, which have aroused more and more attention from the international community, have a significant impact on global climate change and the survival and development of human beings. The exploration of unknown polar areas, the enrichment of polar knowledge, the protection of polar environment, and the promotion of the sustainable development of human society have become the common missions of all mankind. In recent years, China has successively published White Paper: China’s Antarctic Enterprise and White Paper: China's Arctic Policy, marking that the importance of polar scientific research has already risen to a strategic level that impacts national development. As one of the northernmost key universities in China, our university proactively responds to the call of the government. We integrate advantageous resources, such as environment, life, civil engineering, transportation, architecture, and space science, and take the initiative to conduct high-level research related to polar science. As a result, we have made a number of widely influential achievements in scientific research and become a member of the UArctic and the Joint Center for Polar Research of Chinese Universities. With the full leverage of our geographical and multi-interdisciplinary advantages, we established the Polar Academy for the further integration of the resources in polar scientific research, the further development of polar science, the better cultivation of outstanding students, and the better participation of our country in Arctic governance.

Based on the principles - “to know more about polar regions, to protect polar regions, and to promote sustainable development of polar regions”, the PA-HIT aims at the leading edge of polar science and proactively carries out high-level research related to polar science through the crossing and integration of 12 national-level disciplines, such as Environmental Science and Engineering, Physics, Civil Engineering, Architecture, Transportation Engineering, Biology, Food Science and Engineering, etc. We wish to establish a high-level international faculty team, mainly consisting of young and middle-aged internationally renowned scholars, and to build an international research platform. We wish to create first-class research results and cultivate outstanding scientists and technicians. We wish to build a world-class innovation base and enhance the scientific research level as well as international influence of our advantageous disciplines, so as to provide scientific and intellectual support for China’s polar research.

The PA-HIT now has 50 researchers, including an academician, five Chang Jiang Scholars, and five National Distinguished Young Scholars. Apart from Mohe Polar Simulation Experiment Base and UArctic-HIT Training Center, the PA-HIT also has six research centers as its subsidiaries - the International Joint Research Center for Arctic Environment and Ecosystem (IJRC-AEE), the Polar Space Environment Research Center, the International Research Center for Polar and Cold Regions Engineering, the International Joint Research Center for Polar Transportation, the Polar Architecture Research Center, and the Research Center for Polar Biology and Life Process.

The UArctic-HIT Training Center is the first institution of UArctic established by a non-Arctic state. Founded in 2001, the UArctic is the largest international academic organization in the Arctic region, consisting of universities, colleges and research institutes. It focuses on education and research in the circumpolar Arctic region. Our university became a full member of the UArctic in 2018. The UArctic-HIT Training Center will be open to all the students, teachers and researchers from all Chinese universities and research institutes, as long as he or she has an interest in Arctic knowledge and research. The Training Center will provide opportunities for education and research cooperation, through unique and advanced cooperative platforms, so as to strengthen exchanges and cooperation between students, faculty and researchers from Arctic and non-Arctic universities.

The Mohe Polar Simulation Experiment Base, jointly established by the Polar Academy and the Heilongjiang Meteorological Bureau, was inaugurated in Mohe on February 21. The base is located in the Beiji Village (literally “Northernmost") of Mohe, which is a city close to the northernmost boundary of China and known as the “China’s Arctic". The temperatures in Mohe are normally the coldest nationwide. Therefore, it is similar to the polar region in climate, biology, and space electromagnetic environment and has the natural conditions suitable for simulated polar scientific experiments. Meteorological, atmospheric, ecological, and other monitoring equipment are installed in the observation site of the base, equipping the base with a relatively perfect observation system for polar research and the capability to carry out long-term polar simulation experiments. In the future, the base will mainly conduct research on fields such as the environmental behavior of pollutants in the polar regions and the rules of its gas-particle distribution; the atmospheric detection in the interstellar magnetosphere, the ionosphere, and the upper layer; the special effect mechanism of extreme environment on life process; and the remote sensing monitoring technology. The base will provide strong support and guarantee for the polar-related scientific research in our university.

The participants of the above activities include famous scientific research institutions from home and abroad, university experts and scholars, and the leaders of relevant departments in our university.