Thanks to funding from the Santander Staff Mobility scheme, I was able to visit Prof Jinmian Yang at Fudan University, Shanghai.
Prof Yang is one of the leading experts on eye movements during reading in Chinese, and we spent some extremely productive time working on a collaborative eye-tracking study which we will implement and run shortly. Fudan University is one of the most prestigious and selective universities in China with a more than 100 year-long history. It is continually ranked as one of the top three universities in China (together with Peking University and Tsinghua University) and as one of the top 20 universities in Asia.
Fudan University is famously selective, and offers admission to only .2 percent of National College Entrance Exam takers every year. I am very proud to have established a collaboration with one of the leading international universities and am very much looking forward to continuing to work with Prof Yang. As a first step, Prof Yang will visit Bournemouth University this summer so we can do further work on our planned study and on potential grant applications.
During my visit to Fudan University, I was also fortunate to be able to attend the 8th China International Conference on Eye Movements (CICEM) in Nanjing, China, where I presented a talk (and was a co-author on another talk and a poster). As always, I was especially impressed with the quality of the presentations by Chinese postgraduate students. In a very short time (about 20 years), the scientific rigour and quality even of student presentations in this field has risen to a level very close to the international standard.
It is an extremely interesting time to be working with collaborators in China and I am excited to count not only Prof Yang, but also Prof Xingshan Li from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and Prof Chuanli Zang and Prof Guoli Yan from Tianjin Normal University among my collaborators. I believe that these collaborations will be extremely productive and valuable in the future and am very much looking forward to my next visit to China.
Dr Bernhard Angele