Dear fellow colleagues,
In the past year 2019, the Shenzhen Municipal Committee of the CPC and the Shenzhen Municipal People's Government had issued the Action Plan of Developing Shenzhen as a Pilot Demonstration Area for Socialism with Chinese Characteristics (2019-2025). As the plan says, the city will comprehensively construct major innovation platforms, bolster the growth of Shenzhen Bay Laboratory (SZBL) and its affiliated facilities to create a force that will push science and technology forward. This is an epoch-making milestone for the city, and also for us, the Shenzhen Bay Laboratory to develop. To achieve that, Shenzhen Bay Laboratory has been centering its scientific tasks around the world's frontier questions and sharpening research focuses to meet the needs of the Healthy China initiative and the Sci-tech Innovation Plan 2030. Through our interdisciplinary combination of both BT and IT as well as our ongoing integration of global expertise, we will keep implementing frontier research and discovery that can synergistically navigate and lead the development of global knowledge and scientific breakthrough in the days ahead.
Time witnessed the journey we had come so far since January 6, 2019, when Shenzhen Bay Laboratory (Bio-information and Biomedicine Guangdong Laboratory) was officially launched. Shenzhen Bay Laboratory was born out of a blueprint outlining Shenzhen as a global innovation hub where ideas, knowledge, science and technology, and creativity thrives with sustainability that consistently drives the city's development. We, the Shenzhen Bay Laboratory, are bestowed with the mission to support. Our professional endeavors, joined by the top talents, explore the areas of bioinformatics, biomedicine and medical engineering to help fight diseases, provide scientific methods to whole life-cycle health promotion and to improve societal wellness. By deepening our efforts to question and discover, through strengthening our ties with the best minds whilst leveraging the regional competitiveness that we endow from the place we standing on - the City of Shenzhen, we will be shaping the future of what we aspire to become - a global-leading academic and research center for bioscience.
Today marks the 1st anniversary of Shenzhen Bay Laboratory. Retrospectively, the past year 2019 had seen how we fostered our culture of exploration and innovation, and how we achieved fruitful outcomes in many aspects: in system and mechanism, in partnership and mode of collaboration, in our research programs and in talent acquisition, to name a few. As you know, our laboratory has adopted a system in which the lab director is responsible for the management of SZBL under the leadership of the Governing Board. More than that, our scientists play very special and crucial roles in the managerial affairs of our laboratory, where sci-tech innovation and academic research are strongly valued as the core of our undertakings. We highlighted openness and inclusiveness in collaboration. We had established a model for joint appointment to attract more cross-institute partners with a hope to create our own magnetic field for more intellectual forces to join. Meanwhile, we fully leveraged our regional-based competitiveness to grow global partnerships, giving our influence as a provincial-level laboratory to full play. In research and discovery, our laboratory aims to break bottlenecks in technologies that can generate broad impact nationally and even internationally. Our project, named “The Investigation of the Tumor Microenvironment Heterogeneity and the Recurrence, Metastasis and Therapeutic Resistance of the Esophageal Squamous Cell Carcinoma” was approved as a Guangdong Provincial Major Project, and our collaboration with the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen will strive to co-establish an software platform for computational molecular sciences at a most advanced level across the world. In talent acquisition, we had welcomed some of the very influential people of our community to join, like WU Yun-Dong, Xiaoliang Sunney Xie, ZHANG Mingjie, SUN Yongkui and so on. All of them are great supporters to us for they providing expertise and wisdom to our development. Now I would like to share with you on the inspiring facts that we had collectively achieved. Last year, Shenzhen Bay Laboratory took home 4 programs, including 2 provincial-level science programs and 2 provincial-level talent programs; had 18 papers published; and also host or co-host over 10 academic events, receiving great attentions.
Looking back to the year of 2016, China had issued the National Innovation-driven Development Strategy Outline, which proposed a “three-step” strategic target that by the year of 2050, China will build the world's scientific and technological powerhouse. This is a goal and vision that we should support and head towards. Looking forward to 2020, Shenzhen Bay Laboratory will keep on bringing innovative, integrated and internationalized research to bear on the world's challenging health issues and to support our mission and areas of growth. At the moment we are here to find ourselves standing at a threshold of historical transformation, for time and history had both assigned each of us the task to engage and support China's nationwide missions. We will and we have to, focus strengths on a number of historic opportunities in service to the development of China as a nation of innovation, of the Greater Bay Area, of Shenzhen as the pilot demonstration area of socialism with Chinese characteristics and of the national comprehensive science center as well. In the time to come, we will keep living out our missions and values through using and expanding our expertise in research, nurturing talents, developing technologies, reinforcing academic ties and fostering our vital strength of innovation to ensure that the steps we take are practical and thorough and can lead us to overcome difficulties in our areas. We will launch greater efforts to establish and develop both basic infrastructures and major sci-tech platforms, and will continue the absorption of highly innovative talents to help us create our impact - for the prosperity of the Greater Bay Area, for a healthy China and for a nation of power and innovation.
As a Chinese proverb goes: Spring greets diligent people earlier in reward of their hard work and it is just the right time for us to make endeavors. We are now in the beginning of 2020, a time when the east wind brings the cheerful rain of spring while the winter cold may returns and chills us in all of a sudden. But we are always looking forward to the brightest scenery of spring, regardless of the annoying cold; just as we are always buoyed by the future that we envision, regardless of all difficulties we may predict. We will be embracing our best wishes to welcome the year 2020, with our pursuit to knowledge and science, and our mettle and scale to make innovation and impact. Let us seize the day of this bright early spring and live it to the fullest!
ZHAN Qimin
January 6, 2020
