Professor Li Haiying and his team from the School of Life Sciences of the university, together with Professor Inga R. Grin and his team from the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (ICBFM SB RAS), were awarded the NSFC-RSF Inter-organization Collaborative Research Programme grant for the project ‘DNA Damage Repair System to Improve Stress Tolerance of Sugar Beet’. The NSFC-RSF inter-organizational cooperative research project was approved with direct funding of 1.05 million yuan for the Chinese side and 21 million rubles for the Russian side.

The NSFC-RSFProgramme is a consensus reached between the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) and the Russian Science Foundation (RSF) in a bilateral cooperation agreement covering a number of basic disciplines such as mathematics, physics, chemistry, life sciences, etc; the two sides co-fund 30-40 collaborative projects each year to promote cooperation and exchangeamong scientists from the two countries in conducting basic research. Over the years, the “Cold Zone Plant Molecular Biology Innovation Team” led by Professor Li Haiying has been focusing on the basic theory and application of plant molecular biology of adversity tolerance, and actively carrying out international cooperation with Russia and the United States to build a platform for internationalscientificcooperation, and cultivate an excellent scientific research team. The approval of this NSFC-RSF inter-organizational cooperative research projectshows our school’s unique feature ofrunning programs related to Russia andour deep scientific and technologicalexpertise in cooperation and researchwith Russia.

In the future, our university will strengthen international cooperation and exchanges through multiple channels, encourage exploration, highlight originality, and improve the level of research in basic disciplines;we will be demand-driven,breaking through bottlenecks, andserving the major needs of the national scientific and technological development with ‘basic with application’.