The 7th National Ph.D. Candidates Academic Conference, seminar on new theories, methodology and technology in environmental science and engineering, and the 1st Ph.D. Candidates Environmental Forum between Canada and China was held at SOE from October 16 to 18, 2013. Around 130 Ph.D. Candidates from more than 40 universities and research institutes, including Tsinghua University, Peking University, Beijing Normal University, Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences at Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tongji University, Harbin Institute of Technology, Nanjing University, Shanghai Jiaotong University and Zhejiang University, attended the conference. This year’s conference set a new record in the number of participants.

At the opening ceremony, Prof. He Kebin, Dean of SOE, and Prof. Huang Xia, Director of the State Key Joint Laboratory of Environmental Simulation and Pollution Control, delivered opening speeches respectively. Academician Jiang Guibin from the Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Prof. He Kebin delivered keynote reports titled, “Environment & Health: Beyond the Molecular Era” and “The Feature and Control of PM2.5 in China”, respectively.

In the 3-day conference, the Ph.D. Candidates took part in warm discussions upon many fields of environmental science and engineering, covering water pollution control and resource, air pollution control, solid waste pollution control and resource, environmental economic management and policy, environmental chemistry and toxicology, ecology and climate change. The conference received over 150 papers from more than 40 universities and research institutes in China, and most papers were written in English. In addition, the conference set up a special sub-forum titled “Ph.D. Candidates Environmental Forum between Canada and China”. Eight Ph.D. Candidates from the University of Manitoba, the University of Calgary and the University of Alberta, Canada, were invited to the sub-forum.