Huazhong Agricultural University

Overview

Huazhong Agricultural University

Huazhong Agricultural University (HZAU or Central China Agricultural University) is a public research university located in Wuhan City, Hubei, China. Founded in 1898 as Hubei Farming School, it merged with various agricultural colleges in Wuhan to form Huazhong Agricultural College in 1954 and was renamed Huazhong Agricultural University in 1985. HZAU is part of Project 211 and is categorized as a Double First-Class Discipline University by the Chinese Ministry of Education.

Huazhong Agricultural University Key Statistics

The university is made up of 18 colleges and departments focused on agricultural disciplines as well as the development of multi-disciplinary approaches to humanities and sciences. Some of its core academic units include the College of Horticulture & Forestry Sciences, College of Life Sciences & Technology, and College of Animal Sciences & Technology / College of Veterinary Medicine.

HZAU offers more than 50 undergraduate programs, 87 master’s programs, 54 Ph.D. areas of specializations, and 10 post-doctoral research stations.

Huazhong Agricultural University has an estimated student enrollment of about 20,000. It has more than 2,600 faculty members, with 312 professors, four academicians of the Chinese Academies of Sciences and Engineering, two academicians of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World, and a foreign associate of the United States National Academy of Sciences. Huazhong Agricultural University is spread out over a 1,223-acre campus of teaching buildings and research laboratories.

Other Huazhong Agricultural University key statistics include a library, which opened in 2006. It measures 33,5145 square feet and has more than 3,500 reading seats and an open reading room.

Huazhong Agricultural University Research

The university is classified as a state key laboratory affiliated with the Chinese Ministry of Education. It receives research funding from the state as a partner for training senior special agricultural personnel. The university has collected CN¥1.07 billion ($165.5 million) in cooperation project funding to date.

The top fields of Huazhong Agricultural University research are biology, chemistry, and genetics. HZAU researchers and academics have presented their works at conferences, such as NeurIPS: Neural Information Processing Systems, ICML: International Conference on Machine Learning, and ICLR: International Conference on Learning Representations.

Huazhong Agricultural University’s most cited research is Sato et al.’s (2012) “The tomato genome sequence provides insights into fleshy fruit evolution,” published in Nature with 2,483 citations so far. Its second most cited publication is McCouch et al.’s (2001) “Development and mapping of 2240 new SSR markers for rice (Oryza sativa L.).” The article appeared in DNA Research and has received 2,041 citations.

Huazhong Agricultural University research with the third most number of citations is Wang et al.’s (2011) “The genome of the mesopolyploid crop species Brassica rapa.” The paper has garnered 1,736 citations to date and was featured in Nature Genetics.

HZAU houses numerous laboratories and research centers at university and provincial to national and ministerial levels. These include 19 provincial and ministerial key laboratories, 24 provincial and ministerial R&D centers, and two provincial humanities and social sciences research bases. It likewise operates six specialized laboratories such as the National Key Laboratory of Crop Genetic Improvement, National Key Laboratory of Agro-Microbiology, and Animal Biosafety Level 3 Laboratory of Huazhong Agricultural University.