Sun Yat-sen University

Overview

Founded in 1924 and located in Guangzhou, Guangdong, Sun Yat-sen University is one of the most renowned public universities in China. Also called Zhongshan University or colloquially as Zhongda, this high-profile, research-intensive university was named after the globally-recognized Chinese revolutionary leader, Sun Yat-sen, who founded the Republic of China, which encompassed the whole of China before moving to current Taiwan.

Consistently ranked among the best universities in China, Asia, and the world, Sun Yat-sen University runs and maintains five campuses inside the three cities of Shenzhen, Zhuhai, and Guangzhou. With ten affiliated hospitals, the university owns the most number of affiliated hospital systems in the Chinese mainland. By sheer acreage, its campus in Zhuhai holds the record of having the largest teaching building in the whole of Asia.

Sun Yat-sen University provides undergraduate and graduate programs in the natural sciences, managerial science, social sciences, technology, pharmacology, and the humanities. The university holds the unique distinction of having two institutions, the Lingnan College and the Sun Yat-sen Business School, earning triple accreditation by AMBA, AACSB, and EQUIS. It is the only Chinese university to receive the distinction, along with around 58 other universities in the world.

Sun Yat-sen University offers around 130 undergraduate majors, 59 master's degree programs, 49 doctorate programs, and 30 professional degree programs. The programs involve more than 100,000 students who are served by close to 20,000 full-time faculty, including around 5,000 full and associate professors. It also offers dual degrees through its partnerships with the Erasmus University, Rotterdam School of Management, and ESCP Europe.

The university's Guangzhou campuses are composed of 46 major colleges, schools, and departments, some of which are further organized into minor divisions. Among these are the Liberal Arts College, the Lingnan College (with its Departments of Economics, Finance, Insurance and Risk Management, and Logistics Engineering and Management), the School of Advanced Computing, and the School of Physics.

The Shenzhen campus, meanwhile, offers the famous School of Medicine, the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and the School of Intelligent Systems Engineering, among others.

Among the highly-regarded institutes that the university runs with international partners are the Lehn Institute of Functional Materials (with ETH Zurich, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, and the University of Strasbourg), the Sino-French Institute of Nuclear Engineering & Technology (with Institut national des sciences et techniques nucléaires, École nationale supérieure de chimie de Montpellier, Chimie ParisTech, Ecole des mines de Nantes, and the Grenoble Institute of Technology), and the Joint Institute of Engineering (Carnegie Mellon University), among others.

With its Tianhe-2, Sun Yat-sen University owned the fastest supercomputer in the world from 2013 to 2015. In 2020, it still ranks as the fifth fastest in the list of the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world, which is currently led by Fugaku of Japan.

The research quality of Sun Yat-sen University places it well among the highest in the world in terms of citation numbers. Most of the citations are from prominent works in the field of physics, chemistry, clinical medicine, biology and biochemistry, agricultural sciences, and neuroscience and behavior, among others.

Many notable personalities call Sun Yat-sen University their alma mater. Among them are Li Fanghua (physicist), Yingying Zhang (crop productivity and photosynthesis), and Xu Ningsheng (21st president of Fudan University).