On September 9, 2014, there held a grand meeting in Beijing to celebrate the 30th Teachers' Day and to commend the National “Advanced Units and Individuals” Among China’s Education System, where the School of Food Science and Technology (FST) of Jiangnan University (JU) obtained an honorable title of “The Advanced Units of National Education System” and FST’s “The Research and Practice of Food Science Talent Cultivating in the Mode of Chain Education” obtained “The First Prize of National Higher Education Teaching Achievements Award”, two historical breakthroughs of JU.

National Teaching Achievement Award (NTAA), National Natural Science Award, Technology Innovation Award and Progress Prize in Science and Technology, are renowned as China's four top national awards. With a quadrennial appraisal, NTAA is of great significance and has far-reaching influence on China’s higher education. The program of “The Research and Practice of Food Science Talent Cultivating in the Mode of Chain Education” aims to solve the main problems of the weakening of students’ engineering capacity and lack of engineering practice training existing in the food science talent cultivation. An innovative talent training mode has been put forward through this program characterized by “Whole-process Talent Cultivation” and based on the comprehensive training and the promotion of their engineering capacity.

“The national ‘Advanced Units and Individuals’ of Education System” award is evaluated and honored by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security and the Ministry of Education. The School of Food Science and Technology is the first one of JU to achieve the honor. In recent years, the School of Food Science and Technology has been making great efforts in the discipline construction and has forged distinctive features. It has made great progress in many aspects such as talent cultivation, scientific research and teaching staff construction. Also, the discipline of Food Science and Technology was ranked NO.1 for the consecutive second times according to the latest National Discipline Evaluation.