On December 9, the first “Great Northern Agriculture Cup” final and award ceremony of the national academic science and technology works contest between graduate students from agriculture and forestry colleges and universities was held at the China Agricultural University. Wan Caichao, Jiao Yue and Hao Mingchao from Materials Science and Engineering College in our school won the special award for their scientific and technological invention “environmentally friendly and efficient adsorption and oil-water separation materials based on cellulose aerogels.” Five works won the third class prize including Wang Yan’s “the differences between root morphology, anatomy, chemistry and hydraulic conductivity characteristics of three tree species in different soil layers.” NEFU also was awarded an Outstanding Organization Award.

The contest was organized by the graduate student management work institute of the agricultural and forestry discipline committee, and co-organized by China Agricultural University and Beijing Forestry University. The aim was to drive subject innovation to serve the needs of society and promote the speed of the achievements transformation of talent training. The contest lasted two months and the final included three categories of papers: natural science academic, scientific and technological inventions, and the social survey reports and academic papers of philosophical and social science.

Our school attached great importance to the contest and was careful and elaborate in the selection, recommendation, guidance and the optimization of the works. Under the guidance of academician Li Jian, the work by Wan Caichao and other students focused on the preparation of cellulose aerogels based on agriculture and forestry biomass resources as raw materials, and built new aerogel adsorption material through means such as physical and chemical modification, doping, and pyrolysis, in order to process polluting water such as oily wastewater, dye wastewater, heavy metal ion wastewater. The work won unanimous praise from the experts for its perspective and preciseness.

The contest strengthened the academic exchange of graduate students between our school and other colleges and universities, expanded the vision of professional field, and promoted the innovation, cutting-edge and scientific research consciousness, and the collaboration involving production, teaching and research of the graduate students in our school.