Big data to make innovation for health science in China

Liu Xiangrui

(China Daily)

Updated: 2017-09-15

Jay Siegel instructs his student at Tianjin University. He says he aims to help the students find a balance between developing skills and creative thinking. [Photo provided to China Daily]

Jay Siegel's daily tasks are manifold－from the smallest details to the grandest projects. The scientist from the United States has worked on molecular design, chemical synthesis and structural analysis, the three main components of modern stereochemistry.

His research combines synthetic and physical organic chemistry with an eye on pharmaceutical, material and life sciences.

Earlier, Siegel, 58, was with the University of Zurich.

In 2013, he became the dean of the School of Pharmaceutical Science and Technology at Tianjin University in North China. He is among the few foreign heads of university departments in the country.

Now, he is also the dean of the School of Life Science in the same university.

Siegel recalls how unlikely it seemed at first for him to come to work in Tianjin. He couldn't speak Chinese and hadn't taught students from the Chinese mainland either.

But in 2010, a Sino-Swiss exchange program brought him to China for the first time, when he gave a series of lectures at universities in Shanghai, Beijing and Tianjin.

The next year, he became a member of the Thousand Talents program, initiated by the Chinese government to attract high-level foreign experts to work in China.

Eventually, he joined Tianjin University.

The decision was taken by him together with his wife, Kim Baldridge, a scholar of the Thousand Talents program who also works in Tianjin.

"It came down to what we really wanted to do," Siegel says of his career move.