Former Changsha Railway University
Changsha Railway University, formerly known as Central South College of Civil Engineering which was founded in 1953, was established in 1960 on the basis of the institutionalized departments and teaching and research offices. It is affiliated to the former Ministry of Railways and is a multidisciplinary university with industrial characteristics. Its disciplines cover Engineering, Science, Liberal Arts, Economy, Management and Law, of which Engineering is dominant.
The university has established 5 schools, 2 directly-affiliated departments, 1 directly-affiliated scientific research institute and 4 directly-affiliated research institutes (centers); it has set up 17 undergraduate majors, 8 junior college majors and 3 new higher vocational majors.
It is one of the first universities obtaining the rights to confer the doctoral degree and master’s degree; now it has 5 disciplines for cultivation of doctoral candidates, and has the right to confer the doctoral degree in 3 disciplines, i.e. Probability & Statistics, Bridge & Tunnel Engineering, and Road & Railway Engineering, and to confer the master’s degree in 18 disciplines.
The university covers an area of 480,000 m2, with a floor area of about 320,000 m2. Its fixed assets are over CNY 300 million and the total value of instruments and equipment are CNY 73 million. The library has a building area of 10,000 m2, with more than 700,000 books. It is one of the first universities that entered INTERNET and CERNET.
The university has 1,737 teaching and administrative staff members, including more than 800 teachers, more than 300 professors and associate professors, 2 academicians of Chinese Academy of Engineering, 16 doctoral supervisors and 15 national and provincial (ministerial) young and middle-aged experts with outstanding contributions. Among them, there are famous scholars of great academic achievements, including Prof. Liu Baochen, an academician of Chinese Academy of Engineering, foreign academician of Polish Academy of Sciences and expert in geomechanics and engineering, Prof. Zeng Qingyuan, an academician of Chinese Academy of Engineering and bridge expert, and Prof. Hou Zhenting, an international Davidson prize winner and mathematician.
The university has 9,332 students, including 6,229 full-time undergraduate students, 297 doctoral and master degree candidates, and 2,806 undergraduate and junior college students of correspondence courses and night schools. For over forty years, the university has cultivated more than 30,000 graduates.
The university has 2 key disciplines supported by the former Ministry of Railways and 4 key majors supported by Hunan province. Since 1978, it has undertaken a total of more than 1,700 scientific research projects, including national key projects, key projects of National Natural Science Foundation of China, projects of National Social Science Fund of China, national “863” projects and international cooperation projects, etc. It owns more than 200 scientific and technological achievements at national, ministerial and provincial level. The university has won more than 130 ministerial and provincial awards or above, including 23 international awards, national natural science awards, national technological invention awards and science and national technology advancement awards. It has formed certain advantages and characteristics in terms of civil engineering, transportation, machinery manufacturing, information technology, mathematics and foreign language, etc.;
──Civil engineering: There are 2 doctoral programs and 7 master programs; a strong subject echelon led by 2 academicians; a batch of national major projects winning National Grand Prize, First Prize and Third Prize for Progress in Technology and Science and Fourth Prize of National Natural Science in railway engineering, bridge and tunnel engineering, geomechanics engineering and disaster prevention engineering, etc.
──Transportation: The High Speed Train Research Center in School of Traffic & Transportation Engineering of CSU undertakes the research on appearance design of Chinese high speed trains and train collision dynamics, and the research results have been praised as international advanced. The center has the most advanced experimental apparatus in China and is the research base of aerodynamics for high speed trains of the former Ministry of Railways. It has gained significant achievements in the fields of railway rolling stock, automatic control and transportation management, and solved major problems in railway transportation.
──Mathematics: There is an academic team led by Prof. Hou Zhenting. This team gathers plenty of excellent young and middle-aged talents and has made great achievements in the research on Markov process. It has won Davidson Award for twice and the Third Prize of National Natural Science, and their fruit “minimum nonnegative solution” is internationally renowned as “Hou’s Theorem”.
──Information technology: The research group led by a young professor Dr. Li Yibing on Nano electronic materials has a high reputation in the world. Their research result is called “Liyi Method” by the academicians of U.S. National Academy of Sciences and Italian Academy of Sciences; the group has undertaken the major projects of National Natural Science Foundation of China, wining the Second Prize of Fok Ying-Tung Education Foundation for researches; in the aspect of computer control technology, it has solved the problems such as float glass on-line automatic detection, wining the Third Prize of National Technological Innovation. A batch of projects including the research on “863” international cooperation project “GIMS” application demonstration project are under way.
──Machinery manufacturing: The researchers of the university have developed the first CNC spiral bevel gear milling machine in China, one of the six major technological leapfrogs for CNC machine tool products in China in recent years.
──Foreign language studies: The researches on English Language and Literature and Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics have formed its own characteristics. Some research results have won awards for national and provincial social science researches for many times; the university is an important base of the former Ministry of Railways and Hunan province for foreign language academic research and exchange and talent training.
In response to the requirements of the Ministry of Education for evaluation on undergraduate education, the university voluntarily submitted a request to officially launch “construction project for excellent undergraduate education” in 1997; it pushes forward the teaching reform based on the demand of the 21st century and comprehensively strengthens teaching construction and teaching management to drive the all-round development of the university in all aspects. In December 1999, the university was the first one to receive random inspection on undergraduate education by the expert group of the Ministry of Education and praised as “Excellent”.
In 1978, the university started to employ foreign experts. Till now, there have been more than 120 foreign experts and scholars who are teaching or once taught here; the university has established cooperation with universities in the United States, France, Germany, Britain, Belgium and Australia successively, and has the right to recruit foreign students.
As the first university to establish a board of directors in Hunan Province, the university has 78 director units and has close transverse contact with society. The university-based enterprise covers more than 20 entities, usually sci-tech companies, and has an annual output value CNY 80 million.
