Forum for the Asia-Pacific Bio-signal Center & Conferring Ceremony for Honorary Professorship Held at TJU

On September 24, the 2001 Nobel laureate Leland Harrison Hartwell was granted an honorary professorship of Tianjin University (TJU) during a conferring ceremony at the TJU conference building. Six of his team members from the U.S. were also conferred TJU guest professorship. They are Dr. Tuofu Zhu from the University of Washington (UW) School of Medicine, Dr. Joshua Labaer, director of the new Virginia G. Piper Center for Personalized Diagnostics of the Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute, Professor Peter W. Laird, founding director of Epigenome Center at the University of Southern California, and Professor Ziding Feng, Dr. Pei Wang as well as Dr. Amanda Grace Paulovich from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. TJU President Li Jiajun conferred the certificates of honorary and guest professorship to them.

At the conferring ceremony, Professor Hartwell expressed his gratitude for the great honor. In recognition of the strong bond between himself and TJU, he spoke of all-around cooperation being strengthened between his team and TJU. He then presented an overview of the research his team was working on. Their research was very much related to the relevant engineering fields of TJU. This provides much potential for the cooperation between both sides. Afterward, Dr. Hartwell answered questions from the audience.

The Forum for the Asia-Pacific Bio-signal Center was held before the conferring ceremony. At the forum, Dr. Amanda Grace Paulovich, Professor Peter W. Laird, Dr. Pei Wang, and Dr. Zheng Cui from Wake Forest University respectively delivered keynote speeches entitled “An Efficient Strategy for Transforming Proteomic Findings and Biomarker Candidates from Interesting to Impactful”, “DNA Methylation Biomarkers in Cancer Detection and Diagnosis”, “Strategies for Selecting and Prioritizing Biomarker Candidates”, and “From a Serendipitous Discovery to a Novel Cancer Therapy”.

Over 100 people participated in this event. The attendees included the representatives from the United States National Academy of Sciences, University of Washington, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, University of Southern California, Wake Forest University, University of Wisconsin, Tianjin International Joint Academy of Biotechnology & Medicine, Sun Yat-sen University, Capital Medical University, Nanchang University, Taiwan Chang Gung University, as well as faculty and student representatives from TJU.

The Asia-Pacific Bio-signal Centre aggregated a top level research group, and Dr. Hartwell was assigned as the chief scientist of the centre. The centre will be the research headquarters in China of Global Biosignatures Network. It focuses on new diagnosis methods of cancer and severe infectious diseases, aimed at enhancing treatment effect and decreasing medical expenses.