University of Glasgow Connect

Celebrating 35 years of partnership with Sun Yat-Sen University

The University of Glasgow has been collaborating with Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, China, since 1985. In October, we celebrated 35 years of partnership between our two world-class universities by holding a virtual Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signing ceremony.

During the ceremony, Professor Xiao Haipeng, Executive Vice President Global Relations of SYSU and Rachel Sandison, Vice Principal External Relations at Glasgow, signed the MoU to acknowledge their institutions' continued commitment to partnership working. The MoU focussed on staff and student exchange and joint research, across a wide range of thematic and cross-disciplinary ideas.

Over the decades, our areas of research collaboration have spanned disciplines including Medicine, Physics and Astronomy, English and Geosciences and we have seen many staff and student exchanges take place. In addition to the MoU signing ceremony, we undertook a joint workshop to acknowledge existing links and to explore potential for further expansion of our partnership. The event ended with a series of breakout sessions focusing on the different areas of collaboration.

"I am delighted to renew the MoU with our long-term partner Sun Yat-Sen University”, says Rachel Sandison. "Increasing mobility is crucial to enhance research capacity of our staff and employability of our students. I believe this online workshop proves we can work together in a different way during this pandemic and I would like to see more physical exchanges when travel restrictions are eased. It is exciting to see that our partnership is going from strength to strength, I am very much looking forward to more collaboration with SYSU in the future".