Materials Academy, JITRI

Founded in December 2019, Materials Academy, JITRI is headquartered in Xiangcheng District, Suzhou. It is a new R&D institution jointly established by the Jiangsu Provincial People's Government, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, China Iron & Steel Research Institute Group Co., Ltd. and China Baowu Steel Group Corporation Limited. Adopting a brand-new management and operation mechanism, the Academy cooperates with leading enterprises, universities and scientific research institutes in China in the field of materials and gathers multiple academicians and top scientific research teams at home and abroad. With the goal of getting through key nodes in transferring material science into technologies, it builds an industrial technology innovation system integrating R&D carriers, industrial needs and innovation resources, and creates an open innovation ecology comprised of talents, finance, space and other elements. The Academy has been successively approved as Jiangsu Advanced Materials Technology Innovation Center, Jiangsu Key Metal Materials Industry Innovation Center, Jiangsu Material Big Data Public Service Platform and Jiangsu Special Alloy Technology Innovation Center. Materials Academy, JITRI also serves as the secretariat of the Yangtze River Delta Advanced Materials Innovation Alliance of Universities. In August 2020, the key metal materials team led by Academician Gan Yong was awarded the title of the first batch of top innovation teams in Suzhou.

There are currently more than 340 people in the headquarters of Materials Academy, JITRI (settled in Xiangcheng Innovation Complex), including management and platform operation teams, project management teams and jointly trained postgraduates. A total of RMB 600 million has been planned for the Material Characterization Platform, and 147 sets/units of characterization equipment with a total value of nearly RMB 300 million have been purchased, covering various fields such as elemental composition analysis, microstructure characterization, physicochemical property test and mechanical performance test. It has obtained CMA, CNAS and NADCAP qualifications, and is being constructed into a regional public service center at an accelerated pace. Providing one-stop analysis and characterization services for the material industry, it aims to become a first-class material analysis and characterization platform both domestically and internationally. It has integrated professional material research institutes under Jiangsu Industrial Technology Research Institute (JITRI), and established a joint innovation center with nearly 80 leading enterprises in the field of materials and their applications. The Yangtze River Delta University Advanced Materials Innovation Alliance was jointly established by the Materials Academy, JITRI and 26 universities including Zhejiang University, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Nanjing University and the University of Science and Technology of China. Putting stress on enhancing top-level design and planning, the Academy establishes a think tank for academicians of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. Aiming at major national strategic needs, it carries out sustainable, stand-by and forward-looking strategic research around the industrial development and technological innovation of key application technologies, regularly formulating and publishing technical innovation roadmaps for key materials and their applications, and designing effective strategies and pathways for key and core technology breakthroughs.

Looking into the future, Materials Academy, JITRI will design and construct national-level R&D platforms; It will build a regional scientific and technological innovation center in the field of materials to serve the high-quality development of local industrial innovation clusters; It will optimize and improve the "IP processing plant" with laboratory technology incubation as its core, and take the IP processing plant as the carrier to create new material R&D industries and new material technology products; It will focus on the urgent need for high-end talents in regional industrial development, and establish JITRI Tech, an "Innovation Institute of Outstanding Engineers" that combines education, technology and talents, achieving a new mode of industry-education and science-education integration, so as to serve the training of national leading engineers and technicians and support the sustainable development of regional science and technology industries.