Farewell Leigh Martindale

2018-03-08 Gan Zhang

On March 2nd, a farewell gathering took place in Dongjiang Fish Village for seeing off Leigh Martindale. Leigh was supported by SEW-REAP to stay in China for 2 years for his PhD study on food supply chain in rural China. He is supervised by Dr David Tyfield, and was associated to the group. Dyring the last 2 years, he travelled to many places in China including those remote rural places. He was impressed by the young volunteers in the rural areas working for poverty relief. He also learned some Chinese. He left Guangzhou for Lancaster-U to complete his PhD thesis.

Leigh (back row, left 4) has been with us for 2 years. Shown are other SEW-REAP PhD students including Pere (Front right 4) from Spain and Scot (Back left 2) from the UK.

SCP

Speech on Khundkar Memorial Lecture of Dhaka University

2018-03-07 Gan Zhang

On Feb 28 2018, Gan Zhang was invited to give a speech on Khundkar Memorial Lecture in Department of Chemistry of Dhaka University. The speech was entitled ‘Fate of POPs in Asia and Nexus’. The Khundkar lecture was setup in memory of Professor Mukarram Hussain Khundkar who was the father of chemistry in Pakistan and Bangladesh. This was its 31st Lecture. It is interesting that Professor Orjan Gustafsson who is going to visit our group made the 26th Lecture of the kind Nov 4 2013. What a small world!

SCP

Signing of MoA between GIGCAS and University of Dhaka, Bangladesh

2018-02-05 Gan Zhang

On 28^th-31^stJan of 2018, Prof. Gan Zhang, Dr. Xin Liu and Manqing Wu were invited to visit Bangladesh for signing a Memorandum of Agreement (MoA) with University of Dhaka, to further strengthen collaboration in our ongoing project, Southern Contaminants Programme (SCP, 2017-2019). The MoA covers several areas including exchange of researchers, cooperation on scientific and educational activities, and sharing of academic resources. Professor Habib from Department of Chemistry made great effort to facilitate this cooperation. Many thanks to his enthusiastic hospitality, we met a lot of host friends and visited a heavily polluted river (Buringanga) and a dumping site (Demra). In fact, Prof. Habib and his group members have deployed 1 AAS and ~40 PAS across Bangladesh.

Old campus of University of Dhaka, Bangladesh (UDB). British colonial architecture.

Public lab for undergraduate. We saw our old friend, a rotary evaporator.

Being surrounded by local students, extremely feeling good.

World-famous Professor Gan was warmly welcomed and awarded a “Welcome Medal” by Prof. Abu Jafar Mahmood (left) and Prof. Abdus Salam (right) from Department of Chemistry, UDB.

The signing of the MoA between GIGCAS and UDB.

A short discussion with Vice-Chancellor of UDB, Professor Md. Akhtaruzzaman, after the signing. They believed the MoA would definitely pave the ground to help reinforce and further expand cooperation.