October 20, 2016
Good science transcends culture, language and distance, as it did last week during an annual symposium that attracted a large group of China’s top physician scientists to the U-M Health System (UMHS).
Faculty members from China’s Peking University Health Science Center (PUHSC), the country’s premier medical school and research institution, joined UMHS colleagues and collaborators in Ann Arbor for the Symposium of the Joint Institute (JI) for Translational and Clinical Research. In all, 75 PUHSC faculty members made the 14-hour journey from Beijing, the largest single delegation of visiting scholars ever hosted by the U-M Medical School.
“It is unusual to have people from such different cultures, with different languages, different approaches, and different ways of working, to partner with each other. What we are doing together is remarkable,” said Joseph C. Kolars, M.D., the Josiah Macy, Jr. Professor of Health Professions Education and senior associate dean for education and global initiatives.
The annual meeting is organized through Global REACH, which oversees many of medical school’s international partnerships. In six short years since its launch, the UMHS-PUHSC JI has grown to include more than 30 ongoing research projects, each led by a PI from both institutions, across a number of fields, including liver, pulmonary, renal, cardiovascular and other diseases. This year’s symposium, which took place Oct. 12-14, featured keynote speeches from PUHSC President Qimin Zhan and UMHS Executive Vice President of Medical Affairs and U-M Medical School Dean Marschall S. Runge, M.D., Ph.D.
To read more about this year's symposium, click the below link.