1. Program Overview

Established in October 2007 with the approval of the Ministry of Education, the Applied Chemistry Program offers the Bachelor of Science degree. We enrolled the first batch of undergraduate students in Applied Chemistry in August 2008. So far, we have enrolled students for 13 consecutive years and successfully trained graduates of 9 years, with a total of 382 graduates and 112 students currently enrolled. Our enrollment has grown from 30 students/year upon establishment to about 40 students/year at present.

Our faculty team has expanded from 7 at the beginning to 33 at present, including 6 professors, 10 associate professors, 14 lecturers, and 3 experimental managers; above 90% of them have Ph.D. degrees, and 17 have overseas study and further training experience.

In the past ten years or so, the program has made great progress, with teaching conditions gradually improved, professional characteristics and advantages increasingly highlighted, and the quality of students trained robustly enhanced. Our chemistry discipline passed the independent assessment of Shanghai undergraduate programs in May 2017 and was ranked among the global top 1% of ESI for the first time in September 2019.

In the last five years, the employment rate of our students was close to 100%. Every year, more than 40 students were admitted to top universities in China without sitting for entrance examinations or offered opportunities for further studies at domestic and foreign universities after passing entrance examinations.

2. Hardware Construction

Currently, the Applied Chemistry Program has nine undergraduate teaching laboratories (general chemistry, inorganic chemistry, analytical chemistry, organic chemistry, physical chemistry, chemical principles, instrumental analysis, biochemistry, specialized comprehensive laboratory) and an analytical testing platform.

It is equipped with the scanning electron microscope (SEM), transmission electron microscope (TEM), gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer (GC-MS), inductively coupled plasma-atomic emission spectrometer (ICP-AES), atomic absorption spectrophotometer (AAS), fluorescence spectrophotometer, AutoLab electrochemical workstation, automatic BET surface area analyzer, thermal analyzer, high-performance liquid chromatograph (HPLC), gas chromatograph (GC), infrared spectrometer, UV-Vis spectrophotometer, PCR, and other instruments and equipment, with a total value of over RMB 10 million.

The Applied Chemistry Program has established off-campus practical teaching bases with well-known biopharmaceutical companies such as Jiangsu Yangnong Chemical, Zhejiang Medicine Changhai Pharmaceutical, and STA; launched a pilot project of “internship–graduation thesis–employment” joint training with STA in 2015 undergraduate students of applied chemistry.

3. Construction Experience

After more than a decade of development and promotion, we have accumulated rich experience in professional construction.

1) Standardized teaching management. We focus on the construction of the system and basic norms and continuously improve the teaching quality control system. In the operation of teaching management, we have established a series of quality control systems such as the "semester work plan" system, teaching work and laboratory management system.

2) Normalized teaching supervision. We have established teaching supervision systems such as leadership listening to lectures, secondary teaching supervision, online teaching evaluation, and teaching evaluation by the teaching research department, and conducted total process monitoring and timely feedback on teaching through the inspection of teaching materials and student seminars at the beginning, ordinary time, mid-term, and end of semesters.

3) All-faculty professional construction. Through the organization of special teaching and research activities, all teachers of the chemistry program discuss the planning of professional construction and the development and optimization of talent training schemes together.

4) Institutionalized safety management. There are many risk factors in chemistry experiments, and accidents such as cuts, burns, fires, and poisoning can occur if operating procedures are violated. Hence, safety education and management of teachers and students combined with teaching is crucial. Safety management is inseparable from rules and regulations, the implementation of which is the essential condition for protecting the safety of teachers and students and ensuring the smooth implementation of teaching.

4. Achievements

After more than a decade of professional construction, we have made some achievements in the Applied Chemistry Program, mainly including the following aspects.

1) We have accumulated rich school-running experience and developed reasonable talent training objectives and schemes.

2) The teaching conditions have markedly improved, with the space expanded from 100 m² back then to 2,400 m² nowadays (24 times the original area), and the experimental conditions and teaching platform substantially improved. The total value of instruments and equipment for chemistry has increased from RMB 1 million upon establishment to more than RMB 10 million at present. The Chemistry Experimental Teaching Center was approved as a university-level experimental teaching demonstration center in 2021, and practice internship bases have been established in more than 10 chemical enterprises.

3) The faculty team has been continuously strengthened and expanded from 7 people upon establishment to 33 at present, including 30 full-time researchers and teachers and 3 laboratory managers. Among them, above 90% (30) of teachers have Ph.D. degrees, and 17 have overseas study and further training experience. Through the external introduction and internal training, the education and professional title structure of the faculty have become increasingly reasonable.

4) The teaching standards continue to improve. As of June 2021, the construction projects for more than ten courses had been completed, such as General Chemistry and Physical Chemistry of the Shanghai Municipal Key Course Project, Analytical Chemistry of the Key Course Project of Shanghai Municipal Education Commission, and Inorganic Chemistry of the core curriculum of USST. Moreover, a Shanghai Curriculum Ideological and Political Pilot Team and 11 Shanghai Curriculum Ideological and Political Pilot Courses were approved in 2019. In 2020, Human Civilization and Chemistry was approved as a key course in Shanghai universities and colleges; Organic Chemistry Experiment was approved as a first-class undergraduate course at the university level. Teachers have published more than 50 papers on teaching and research; awarded over 10 university-level teaching and reform projects and more than 80 municipal and university-level innovation and entrepreneurship training projects.

5) The level of scientific research has been significantly raised. In the last five years, teachers of this program have published more than 200 high-level SCI papers, including 44 papers in the first group (zone) and 63 papers in the second group; undergraduates have published over 30 papers, including 8 papers in the first group. We have undertaken more than 20 national and provincial projects, including 1 general project of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) and 7 projects of the National Science Foundation for Distinguished Young Scholars, with total funding of over RMB 5.3 million; declared more than 30 invention patents.