Meeting with Jilin Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention and International Disaster Risk Research Groups in Beijing

A four-person CCOUC team led by CCOUC Director Professor Emily Chan conducted an exploratory trip to Jilin Province and Beijing from 20 to 23 July 2016 and held meetings with Jilin Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention (JPCDC), local academic institutions and international disaster risk research groups.

Aiming to explore potential collaboration in Northeast China, CCOUC team met Deputy Director Mr Chiguang Fang of JPCDC and his team. In the meeting, the team learnt about the disaster medical response situations in the province and the two sides had discussion on the upcoming collaborations between CCOUC and JPCDC including the “Ethnic Minority Health Project” (EMHP) in Jilin Province, training and research, so as to determine the direction of future cooperation. The team also visited JPCDC’s Center for Infectious Diseases, Emergency Command Center and various laboratories to understand JPCDC’s work in disaster response.

In Beijing, the team visited a number of local and international academic institutions to learn about their research directions. In Tsinghua University, the team met Professor Hong Huang from the Institute of Public Safety Research and exchanged about public safety research. In Beijing Normal University, the team met Professor Saini Yang, the coordinator of The State Key Laboratory of Earth Surface Processes and Resource Ecology, and Dr Jing Chen, the Executive Director Assistant for Integrated Risk Governance Project (IRG Project), a core project under the Future Earth programme steered by international scientific bodies including International Council for Science (ICSU), at IRG’s International Project Office in Beijing. The two parties have explored areas for future collaboration.

During the stay in Beijing, the team also met Dr Rajib Shaw, Executive Director of the International Programme Office of the Integrated Research on Disaster Risk (IRDR), another international programme sponsored by ICSU. In the meeting, CCOUC learnt more about the vision and latest development of IRDR and explored future collaborations between the two institutions.