Basic Information of the Department of Chemistry

The Department of Chemistry at Nanchang University was founded in 1958 and has a history of more than 60 years. In 1986, it achieved master's degree spots in Analytical Chemistry and Physical Chemistry. In 2010, it achieved doctoral degree spot in chemistry. In 2014, it achieved postdoctoral research station in Chemistry. The Department of Chemistry has been formed by faculty of National Distinguished Young Scientists, Ten Thousand Plan, the Yangtze River Scholars, National Natural Science Prize Winner, and 96 team members. 74.2% of the faculty members have a Ph. D. degree, and 51.5% have the experience to study abroad. Since 2016, the department has independently cultivated 2 National Pacesetter Project members, 1 Youth Yangtze River Scholar and 7 Lift Project for Young Scientists of China Association for Science and Technology, and employed flexibly 1 Yangtze River Scholar.

Based on the existing discipline foundation and advantages, the department is closely serving the major national development strategies and regional characteristic economy of Jiangxi, carrying out scientific research focusing on the Jiangxi Province and the national strategic industrial, major livelihood and cutting-edge issues of science and technology, making efforts to form a production-learning-research collaborative innovation mechanism, promoting achievements transformation, agglomeration, and training a number of top creative talents, contributing to a number of major landmark achievement outputs. The ultimate goal is to construct a high-level disciplinary system with reasonable layout, distinctive features, outstanding advantages and harmonious development.

According to the demand of national sustainable development strategy and new energy key pillar industry development of Jiangxi Province, and relying on local lithium-ion batteries, rare earth resources and organic silicon industry, some major research fields have been developed, which include Ferroelectric Chemistry, New Energy Chemistry, Green Catalytic Engineering, and Rare Earth Resources. These research fields have distinct characteristics and permeate through all the secondary chemistry disciplines. Furthermore, chemistry discipline also intersects with physics, materials, environment, biology, medicine and other disciplines, thus having formed a harmonious research atmosphere and gained certain domestic and overseas influence.

The chemistry discipline is the first leading discipline in Jiangxi Provincial University Discipline Alliance, and has entered the world high level ranks. In 2023, the United States Essential Science Indicators Database (ESI) indicated chemistry discipline is ranked the top 1.72‰ globally in chemistry discipline. There has four provincial key laboratories and a comprehensive experimental platform jointly built by the central and local governments. Over the past five years, chemistry discipline has presided one major project approved by the National Natural Science Foundation (Jiangxi province for the first time, 19.47 million). The discipline actively promotes school-enterprise cooperation, conducts school-running cooperation with well-known enterprises. More than 10 research groups have transformed over 20 scientific and technological achievements, promoted the development of related industries and achieved good social and economic benefits.

The objective for training graduate talents of chemistry is to help them gain solid professional knowledge and build up first-class scientific research capability, understand the development trend of the related chemical fields, achieve independent ability working on the basic theory and frontier issues in chemistry, solving complex engineering problems and developing related products. Thus, they can make creative achievements in the chemistry field and become moral, intellectual and physical developed specialized talents.

This discipline adopts the combination of independent training and foreign joint training in a planned way to cultivate graduate students. Over the past five years, 50 doctoral students and 350 master's students have been trained successively. A number of graduate students went to the United States, Germany and other famous foreign universities for further education and joint training. Many graduate students won provincial excellent graduation thesis; Research papers with graduate students as the first authors have been published in international high-level journals. Graduate students of chemistry discipline have been admitted to research institutes of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and well-known universities domestic and abroad for further study; The employment rate of the postgraduate students is more than 90% in the chemical and chemical industry, and the contract units from other provinces. The graduates who have worked are generally praised by employers for their solid foundation, high quality and strong innovation ability. According to the follow-up survey on the development of graduate students, graduates develop well and can actively adapt to the requirements of units and society.

The construction and good development of the chemistry discipline at Nanchang University will have a significant impact on the development of chemistry research and the economy of Jiangxi Province and even China. The Department of Chemistry of Nanchang University seizes the opportunity, continues to highlight the two themes of "innovation" and "quality", improves the quality of personnel training, tries to train a large number of high-level, high-quality, diverse and innovative professionals and produces a batch of landmark results of the international advanced level, all in order to provide more human resources and intellectual support for the national economy and society development.