On April 21, at the invitation of the Institute of Bioengineering, Professor Jens Nielsen of the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden visited our school. He was appointed as a visiting professor and made academic exchange thereafter. President Chen Jian met with Professor Jens Nielsen.

The conferred ceremony was held at the report hall on the second floor of the National Engineering Laboratory for Cereal Fermentation Technology. Xu Zhenghong, Dean of School of Biotechnology, hosted the ceremony. Vice-Chancellor Gu Zhengbiao presented Professor Jens Nielsen as a visiting professor and wore the school emblem for him. Subsequently, Professor Jens Nielsen gave an academic report entitled “Metabolic Engineering of Yeast for Production of Fuels and Chemicals” for teachers and students of the Department of Bioengineering, State Key Laboratory and National Engineering Laboratory. He first introduced his team’s progress in alkanes, amino acids, fatty acids produced by yeast cell in recent years. Then, he analyzed the application of Design-Build-Test Cycle altering yeast and producing series chemicals in metabolic engineering. Next, he introduced in detail the latest research on the model of genome-scale metabolic network assisting cell factory design. Finally, he introduced the relationship between the protein /mRNA abundance and the translation efficiency of yeast genetic diversity.

Professor Jens Nielsen is a renowned scholar in the field of metabolic engineering and synthetic biology as well as chairman of the International Society for metabolic engineering. He has won the International Metabolic Engineering Award, the International Biochemical Engineering Award, Charles D. Scott Award and other awards. He has published 579 SCI papers in such journals as Cell, Nature, Science, Nature Biotechnology, which were cited more than 20,000 times, and the H index is 71 (Web of Science) and 95 (Google Scholar).

He serves as the editor, deputy editor or editor of 17 peer-review journals including Metabolic Engineering, Biotechnology and Bioengineering, ACS Synthetic Biology, Applied and Environmental Microbiology. Besides, he has been elected as the foreign academician of American Academy of Engineering and the academician of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences, the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.