On March 12, 2018, President Liu Hanlong of Chongqing University met Professor Paul Fanning, vice president of the University College Dublin (UCD), accompanied by Ms. Ren Yawen, the recruitment assistant of Office of UCD in China . Li Fangchun, vice president of Institute for Advanced Study of Humanities and Social Sciences of Chongqing University, Zhang Chuan, vice dean of the School of Civil Engineering, and other workers were also president at the meeting. Xu Jun, director of the Office of International Cooperation and Exchange, has presided over the meeting.

At the meeting, Liu Hanlong started with extending sincere welcome to the guests, and afterwards gave a brief introduction to Chongqing University. He mentioned that Chongqing  University and UCD had been in a highly integrated cooperation relation, and many of advantageous disciplines of CQU coincided with those of UCD, implying that the two might cooperate in a variety of areas. Now CQU and UCD have cooperated materially in many areas such as architecture, civil engineering and construction management. In particular, about 12 students are currently studying for the degree of UCD under the joint master 1+1+1 program offered by the two. In the future, the two are planning to cooperate in more areas, like humanities & social sciences, economics and business management and landscape architecture.

Li Fangchun and Zhang Chuan respectively gave an introduction to their respective schools and had discussion of the promotion of joint master program and summer camp program. Besides, the School of Economics and Business Management of CQU expressed its intention to cooperate with the UCD Michael  Smurfit Graduate  Business School in lunching similar programs.

After that, Professor Paul Fanning introduced the attendants to the basic condition of UCD and a number of important cooperation projects in China in which UCD had recently been involved. Professor Paul said he totally agreed with the opinions of Liu Hanlong, and clearly pointed out that the two should focus on double-degree cooperation program in the three areas including architecture, civil engineering and construction management, while carrying out cooperation in other programs such as oversea study of postgraduates, teacher exchange, credit program and summer program. In addition, Professor Paul pointed out that he was willing to cooperate with Chongqing University in Sino-foreign cooperative education.

The two exchanged gifts at the end of the meeting, and had photos taken.

Introduction to University College Dublin:

University College Dublin is shortly called UCD and was founded in 1854. In 1997, it was renamed as University College Dublin Ireland and is one of the top universities in Ireland. It has 6 schools, i.e., the School of Arts and Humanities, the School of Business, the School of Engineering and Architecture, the School of Health and Agricultural Science, the School of Sciences, and the School of Social Science and Law. There are currently more than 1,500 teachers and 32,000 students.

University College Dublin is dedicated to offering first-rate teaching and scientific research education. In the past 5 years, it ranked between the 131^st place and the 176^th place among QS World University Rankings, and is among the top 1% university in the world. It is one of the members of Universitas 21. In particular, the UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School of UCD is the only school of business in Ireland that has been accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), the European Quality Improvement System (EQUIS) and Association of MBAs (AMBA). It is hailed as three-crown accredited university. Besides, the disciplines such as electronic engineering, computer, physics, chemistry and bio-pharmaceuticals are playing a leading role in the world.

Ireland is the second exporting country of software. Thanks to the policy support of the state government, a number of world famous high-tech enterprises, such as Google, Microsoft, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter and Pfizer, have set up headquarters or city bases there. As such, Dublin is dubbed as the “European Silicon Valley”.