Officials from the Ministry of Education visit Nanjing Agricultural University in July for further planning of a joint laboratory on animal health and food safety. [Photo/njau.edu.cn] 

Two universities from East China’s Jiangsu province were recently included in a national plan to build world-class laboratories with the cooperation of overseas higher education institutions. 

The Ministry of Education’s plan echoed China’s National Plan for Medium and Long-term Education Reform and Development (2010-20) to facilitate ground-level cooperation between domestic and overseas institutions. It will also contribute to China’s Double First-class plan. The plan, issued in September, is aimed at elevating a group of Chinese universities to world-class level. 

Among the first group of 24 universities announced, Nanjing Agricultural University (NAU) and Hohai University were given an opportunity to make advances in thremmatology and water conservancy respectively. 

NAU will establish a joint laboratory on animal health and food safety with support from Denmark’s University of Copenhagen, the Netherlands’ Wageningen University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of California at Davis, and Cornell University in New York state. 

Offering China’s breeding industry scientific and technological support, the laboratory will focus on frontier issues from animal-derived food safety to the healthy raising of livestock and poultry, while cooperating with other professional groups with an international vision. 

The joint laboratory at Hohai University will take advantage of the school’s traditional strength in water conservation. 

The laboratory will also work with world-renowned institutes like the Dessert Research Center in the United States, the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Waterloo in Canada, and Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands to increase the efficiency of utilization of water resources, effective prevention and reduction of natural disasters, better protection of water ecology, and comprehensive treatment of estuaries and coastal areas.