College of Plant Protection
The College of Plant Protection at Shanxi Agricultural University has a long history which can be traced back to the Department of Reclamation and Cultivation at Mingxian Agricultural and Technical College in 1940. It began to recruit junior college students, undergraduate students, and postgraduate students majoring in Plant Protection in 1956, 1958, and 1978, respectively. The Department of Plant Protection was founded in 1984, merged into the College of Agriculture in 1999, and began to recruit doctoral students that same year. In June 2020, the former Plant Protection Discipline of Shanxi Agricultural University College of Agriculture and the Plant Protection Institute of Shanxi Academy of Agricultural Sciences were jointly established to form the new College of Plant Protection at Shanxi Agricultural University. Now it is one of the independent colleges affiliated to Shanxi Agricultural University.
The college has 117 faculty members, including 12 professors, 9 research professors, 25 associate professors, and 20 associate research professors. Of those, 10 are doctoral supervisors, and 56 are master supervisors. There is 1 external academic dean (Academician), 11 specially appointed professors, 1 representative of the National People's Congress, 1 New Century Excellent Talent of the Ministry of Education, 1 expert with special government allowances from the State Council, 1 post expert of National Agricultural Industry and Technology System, 1 member of the Teaching Steering Committee of the Ministry of Education, 3 Provincial Outstanding Teaching Teachers, 4 Provincial Academic and Technical Leaders, 17 ‘Sanjin Talents’, and 17 experts of Provincial Agricultural Industry and Technology System. The college also has a Provincial Scientific and Technological Innovation team and an Excellent Teaching team.
The college has the National Plant Protection Observation and Experiment Station at Xinzhou, the Crop Pest Observation and Experiment Station at Taiyuan (Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs), Pesticide Registration and Experiment Qualification Unit (Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs), the Shanxi Provincial Key Laboratory of Integrated Agricultural Pest Management, the Shanxi Provincial Green Biological Pesticide Engineering and Technology Research Center, the Shanxi Provincial Plant Protection Graduate Innovation Education Center, the Shanxi Provincial Agricultural Biological Resources and Ecological Environment Experimental Teaching and Demonstration Center, the Shanxi Provincial Insect Herbarium, and other provincial and ministerial-level teaching and research platforms. The faculty have won 3 second-place prizes of the National Science and Technology Progress Award, 2 second-place prizes of the National Teaching Achievement Award, 5 first-place prizes of the Provincial Science and Technology Progress Award, 2 Provincial Teaching Achievement Special Awards, more than 50 other provincial and ministerial-level scientific research and teaching achievement awards, and have established 3 provincial excellent open courses.
The college has doctoral degrees, academic master’s degree, professional master’s degree authorization points, post-doctoral stations, and academician workstations on discipline of plant protection. In addition to plant protection undergraduate and postgraduate coordination training classes, and plant protection excellence classes, the college offers 4 undergraduate majors: plant protection, plant quarantine, pharmaceutical engineering, and biopesticide science and engineering. Among them, the plant protection major is national-level distinctive specialty, part of the first batch of the national outstanding agricultural and forestry talents education and training pilot plan (top-notch innovative), a brand major of Shanxi Province, and selected as the national first-class undergraduate major construction site in 2021. The plant quarantine major will be Shanxi Province’s first-class undergraduate major construction site. In 2020, the major was approved by the Ministry of Education and became the first new biopesticide science and engineering in China. The college currently has 1,115 undergraduate students and 232 master’s and doctoral students. Graduates are mainly engaged in teaching, scientific research, technology promotion, drug development, operation, and management in plant protection-related fields, with an employment rate of over 90%.
Looking back on the past, under the leadership of well-known scholars such as Fangde Tang, Guangzhong Shi, Lianchang Li, Huangying Liang, Yunchun He, Yunning Zhou, Xiongwu Qiao, with the unremitting efforts of several generations of plant protection personnel, many outstanding talents such as Wenying Zhuang (academician), Ren Wang (former FAO Assistant Director-General), Chenzhu Wang (Outstanding Young Talent, NSFC), and Xingzhong Liu (Outstanding Young Talent, NSFC), as well as many outstanding party and government leaders such as Yunlong Wang, Yonghua Gong, Xin'an Guo, Yubing Li, Sanyin Ding, and Wei Liu have become prominent alumni. Looking forward to the future, the college will utilize virtue to cultivate talents as its foundation, strengthen and promote agriculture as its own responsibility, adhere to the college motto of "advocating learning, revitalizing agriculture, and cultivating morality", and strive to build a high-level college with distinctive regional characteristics.
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