The Tianjin University - Johns Hopkins University Conference on Biosafety was held at Tianjin University in Feb. 1
st, 2017 for the first time.
Invited by Prof. Zhang, Director of CBRS, Dr. Anita Cicero and Dr. Caitlin Rivers of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (CHS) were invited for the conference. Dr. Cicero is currently the Deputy Director at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (CHS). She is also an Associate Editor of the journal
Health Security, the leading peer-reviewed journal in this field. Dr. Rivers is a Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
The meeting was chaired by Prof. Weiwen Zhang, the Director of TJU CBRS. After welcome speech given by Prof. Yingjin Yuan, Vice President of Tianjin University, and a brief introduction of Tianjin University provided by Prof. Zhen Zhang, Deputy Director of TJU International Cooperation and Communication Division, Prof. Zhang gave an presentation on CBRS mission, history and some of its recent efforts, as well as recent progress and potential risk of the newly developed biotechnologies such as synthetic biology and genome editing. He also proposed ideas for possible long-term cooperation between TJU CBRS and JHU CHS. Subsequently, Prof. Cicero gave an overall introduction to organization, academic and policy efforts of JHU CHS. Thereafter, Dr. Rivers introduced the recent projects of JHU CHS on biosafety.
Other speakers included Prof. Youhai Sun and Dr. Yang Xue from TJU Law School, Dr. Zexiong Xie from School of Chemical Engineering TJU, Dr. Weidi Dai from School of Computer Science, and Dr. Zhiyun Wang from TJU Environmental School.
