Annual summary (2017)
The year of 2017 is gone in Shenzhen. The year of 2018 has not arrived yet in Hamilton. It’s an interesting and pleasant feeling. I have extra hours in the between, which is perfect to retrospect and prospect.
Year 2017 is a big year, a year of transition, a year full of changes.
First, I started a new position in China from July 1st, as Vice President for External and Student Affairs, in Chinese, 外事及学生事务副校长, in CUHK Shenzhen. The past half a year was the busiest half year in my career over the decade. It’s amazing, working working working, from opening eyes at 6 early morning and closing eyes at 12 midnight.
I worked in five major areas.
1, Moving two thousand students to new residences: You would expect to be a pleasant thing. But, absolutely not. Students had a bad experience a year ago and worried about formaldehyde and other VOCs from furniture. I put best use of my resin knowledge and convinced all move. It’s a satisfying but painful experience in inspecting hundreds of rooms and talking in person to tens of concerned students who had no resin knowledge.
2, Lecturing high schools and visiting provincial/municipal boards of education: I found that in China, top high schools are much more NB than universities. You volunteer to deliver science talks free of charge (and pay transportation and accommodation by yourself), they want to protect students from your disturbance for Gaokao preparation. I delivered 36 talks to 35 high schools in October and November. Well received. It’s challenging to talk to high schools about your research. But’s it’s fun. And as scientists, we suppose to make complicated things simple, in contrast to artists who make simple things complicated.
3, Structuring college system: The university adopted a college system. School is the father and college is the mother for each student. College takes care of all the other things accept for courses and marks. “All the other things” are not well defined, but got to learn step by
step. Education is more complicated than research. The former deals with people while the latter deals with nature. As my PhD supervisor Archie Hamielec once advised me, science is simple, people are complicated. He is absolutely right.
4, Dealing with students who need help: It’s common in one’s life having ups and downs, highs and lows. It’s not easy for the student, the family, and the school. I have dealt with many stressful cases to a level of my satisfaction. My President believed it's because I had a
right attitude towards students in dealing with difficult situations. Maybe, may not. It’s a test of my patience too.
5, Writing two major proposals, Pearl and Peacock: Be frankly. Qi, Hermes, Weifeng and Yong did all the preparation work. Nobody would believe I had the time, anyway. Cross my fingers for the success. It’s important to have the funds for research and collaboration.
In general, it’s an intensive but satisfying half year. I have wonderful colleagues, capable, dedicated, professional and warm‐hearted. It’s important to have people around you, of the type and be compatible.
There are also some things unexpected. For example, my title is external “及” student affairs. The Chinese word “及” means “as well as”. Normally, you would expect A is more important than B in “A as well as B”. But you got be careful. This is the opposite in what I have experienced. I spent almost all time for B so far, though I am determined to get A done too. There are many more unexpected things, good or bad. Another example is that I found this position directly facing students (and parents), which is what a university for. The position has all responsibilities, but no power at all. What are the most important things in a university? Tenure and promotions for faculty members, courses and marks for students, and moneys for all. VP(EAS) is empty‐handed, having nothing but to solve various problems.
Second, PolyMacZhu group experienced a huge change this year. We had three supers who completed thesis and became permanent head damage (PhD), Darko Ljubic, Sharon Li and Lei Lei, with each published six or more good papers. You would expect an empty nest after this. Oh, no no, this is not the case. We still have four PhD and one Master’s students (Yuan Gao, Illinka Mirkovic, Anton Kornberg, Oluseye Adeyemi and Lijun Liu). Illinka aand Anton passed their comprehensives this year. As required, all are now co‐supervised by McMaster colleagues. We also have three PDFs (Yin‐Ning Zhou, Jin‐Jin Li and Darko Ljubic). It’s a total of eight. Fully independent and enjoying freedom? May not. As required, all graduate students are co‐supervised when a supervisor is on leave. No cosupervision for PDF’s. But, PDFs are supposed to be independent researchers. We just had a wonderful Christmas group dinner at a Serbian restaurant in East Hamilton, having all meats with some potatoes and uncooked onions. It’s a very good experience and I wish I were in an age of 30’s.
Let’s do some bean counting for our research productivity in 2017. In the community of scholarship, you either “publish or perish”. We did very well again. It's 18 papers appeared, 3 accepted, 4 submitted! In addition, I gave 13 seminars to universities and research institutes and 4 invited presentations to four conferences.
The top publishers are Qi Zhang 3, Sharon Li 3, Darko Ljubic 2, Lei Lei 2, Hermes Zhu 2. Among the 18, 13 were produced from McMaster and 5 ZJU or ZJUT. It’s an excellent record. Equally impressive are our citation data. Both SCI and Google Scholar are over 10,000, with SCI reaching 1,000 and GS 1,200 in 2018, the highest year. Of course, the papers appeared in 2017 were the work done mainly in 2016. So far we have four papers submitted and six on my hands for revising. I would expect five or six more in the early 2018, so that we can still have about 15 papers for 2018. It’s not an easy task but a realistic target. In terms of quality, recently, Lei Yang produced a work of electrical skin that can detect a mosquito as well as an elephant! Normally, people develop ultra‐soft materials to detect tiny things like mosquitos. Lei Yang will change people’s thinking, that is, hard materials can be ultra‐sensitive too!
What else? Tomorrow is another year, the year of 2018!
Shiping Zhu
December 31, 2017
JHE A415, McMaster U, Hamilton, Canada
Year 2017 is a big year, a year of transition, a year full of changes.
First, I started a new position in China from July 1st, as Vice President for External and Student Affairs, in Chinese, 外事及学生事务副校长, in CUHK Shenzhen. The past half a year was the busiest half year in my career over the decade. It’s amazing, working working working, from opening eyes at 6 early morning and closing eyes at 12 midnight.
I worked in five major areas.
1, Moving two thousand students to new residences: You would expect to be a pleasant thing. But, absolutely not. Students had a bad experience a year ago and worried about formaldehyde and other VOCs from furniture. I put best use of my resin knowledge and convinced all move. It’s a satisfying but painful experience in inspecting hundreds of rooms and talking in person to tens of concerned students who had no resin knowledge.
2, Lecturing high schools and visiting provincial/municipal boards of education: I found that in China, top high schools are much more NB than universities. You volunteer to deliver science talks free of charge (and pay transportation and accommodation by yourself), they want to protect students from your disturbance for Gaokao preparation. I delivered 36 talks to 35 high schools in October and November. Well received. It’s challenging to talk to high schools about your research. But’s it’s fun. And as scientists, we suppose to make complicated things simple, in contrast to artists who make simple things complicated.
3, Structuring college system: The university adopted a college system. School is the father and college is the mother for each student. College takes care of all the other things accept for courses and marks. “All the other things” are not well defined, but got to learn step by
step. Education is more complicated than research. The former deals with people while the latter deals with nature. As my PhD supervisor Archie Hamielec once advised me, science is simple, people are complicated. He is absolutely right.
4, Dealing with students who need help: It’s common in one’s life having ups and downs, highs and lows. It’s not easy for the student, the family, and the school. I have dealt with many stressful cases to a level of my satisfaction. My President believed it's because I had a
right attitude towards students in dealing with difficult situations. Maybe, may not. It’s a test of my patience too.
5, Writing two major proposals, Pearl and Peacock: Be frankly. Qi, Hermes, Weifeng and Yong did all the preparation work. Nobody would believe I had the time, anyway. Cross my fingers for the success. It’s important to have the funds for research and collaboration.
In general, it’s an intensive but satisfying half year. I have wonderful colleagues, capable, dedicated, professional and warm‐hearted. It’s important to have people around you, of the type and be compatible.
There are also some things unexpected. For example, my title is external “及” student affairs. The Chinese word “及” means “as well as”. Normally, you would expect A is more important than B in “A as well as B”. But you got be careful. This is the opposite in what I have experienced. I spent almost all time for B so far, though I am determined to get A done too. There are many more unexpected things, good or bad. Another example is that I found this position directly facing students (and parents), which is what a university for. The position has all responsibilities, but no power at all. What are the most important things in a university? Tenure and promotions for faculty members, courses and marks for students, and moneys for all. VP(EAS) is empty‐handed, having nothing but to solve various problems.
Second, PolyMacZhu group experienced a huge change this year. We had three supers who completed thesis and became permanent head damage (PhD), Darko Ljubic, Sharon Li and Lei Lei, with each published six or more good papers. You would expect an empty nest after this. Oh, no no, this is not the case. We still have four PhD and one Master’s students (Yuan Gao, Illinka Mirkovic, Anton Kornberg, Oluseye Adeyemi and Lijun Liu). Illinka aand Anton passed their comprehensives this year. As required, all are now co‐supervised by McMaster colleagues. We also have three PDFs (Yin‐Ning Zhou, Jin‐Jin Li and Darko Ljubic). It’s a total of eight. Fully independent and enjoying freedom? May not. As required, all graduate students are co‐supervised when a supervisor is on leave. No cosupervision for PDF’s. But, PDFs are supposed to be independent researchers. We just had a wonderful Christmas group dinner at a Serbian restaurant in East Hamilton, having all meats with some potatoes and uncooked onions. It’s a very good experience and I wish I were in an age of 30’s.
Let’s do some bean counting for our research productivity in 2017. In the community of scholarship, you either “publish or perish”. We did very well again. It's 18 papers appeared, 3 accepted, 4 submitted! In addition, I gave 13 seminars to universities and research institutes and 4 invited presentations to four conferences.
The top publishers are Qi Zhang 3, Sharon Li 3, Darko Ljubic 2, Lei Lei 2, Hermes Zhu 2. Among the 18, 13 were produced from McMaster and 5 ZJU or ZJUT. It’s an excellent record. Equally impressive are our citation data. Both SCI and Google Scholar are over 10,000, with SCI reaching 1,000 and GS 1,200 in 2018, the highest year. Of course, the papers appeared in 2017 were the work done mainly in 2016. So far we have four papers submitted and six on my hands for revising. I would expect five or six more in the early 2018, so that we can still have about 15 papers for 2018. It’s not an easy task but a realistic target. In terms of quality, recently, Lei Yang produced a work of electrical skin that can detect a mosquito as well as an elephant! Normally, people develop ultra‐soft materials to detect tiny things like mosquitos. Lei Yang will change people’s thinking, that is, hard materials can be ultra‐sensitive too!
What else? Tomorrow is another year, the year of 2018!
Shiping Zhu
December 31, 2017
JHE A415, McMaster U, Hamilton, Canada