Zhang Xi, President of JLU, and Deborah Terry, President and Vice-Chancellor of UQ, delivered speeches through prerecorded videos.

Zhang Xi extended greetings and thanks to faculty and staff of both universities who have helped made this online symposium possible. He reviewed the cooperation and exchanges between JLU and UQ in the past decade in the fields of sciences, humanities, social sciences, engineering and geosciences. He said that during the the COVID-19 pandemic, the online symposium would provide an opportunity to promote deeper and more diversified cooperation. He hoped that scholars from the two universities would further deepen exchanges and cooperation, promote high-level talent training and facilitate the output of advanced scientific research.

Deborah Terry congratulated JLU on its 74th anniversary. She said that since the two universities established exchange relationship in 2010, they had shared a commitment to providing world-class teaching and research, and had a deep foundation and great potential for cooperation in the fields of life sciences, physics, engineering, materials science, social sciences and law. As the spread of COVID-19 has sounded the alarm for universities, she hoped that universities could carry out in-depth international cooperation to actively seek solutions.

Professor Yu Chengzhong and Professor Idriss Blakey from Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology, Professor Ian Gentle from UQ’s School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences, Professor Lin Quan and Associate Professor Wu Guanglu from JLU’s State Key Laboratory of Supramolecular Structure and Materials, and Professor Guan Buyuan from JLU’s State Key Laboratory of Inorganic Synthesis & Preparative Chemistry shared and discussed in depth about the results of their future materials researches.