Alumni meeting
Alumni event - Shanghai, China - 22 March 2019
During 17 - 25 March 2019, a delegation of Wageningen University & Research visited China and hosted different alumni events. All alumni of Wageningen were welcome to join the event hosted in Shanghai, on March 22nd of 2019.
On Friday evening March 22, an alumni event took place in the Hyatt House hotel in Shanghai/Hongqiao. Twenty alumni came together to listen to speeches and to get to know one another.
The alumni event was organised together with Lankuaikei Argriculture Development (Shanghai) Co., LTD. (LAD) on the occasion of the visit of WUR member of the board Ernst van den Ende to China. The alumni were welcomed by WUR alumni relations officer Denise Spiekerman who spoke about the Wageningen Alumni Chapter China and the intention to broaden the network by setting up Regional Sub Chapters at different locations in China. The alumni reacted positively towards the idea and already some enthusiastic alumni replied that they are willing to get actively involved with this.
Following, the alumni received a speech from Ernst van den Ende with an update from WUR and the newly introduced strategic plan titled 'Finding Answers Together'. Ernst also gave in introduction to the Urban Greenhouse Student Challenge which will take place in China in 2020. The following speaker was director of the WUR China office, Mr. Ding Shenglin, who informed the alumni on the different WUR projects in China. Last speaker was the Chairman of LAD, Mr. Steven Dong, who introduced his company (founded in 2017) to the alumni present.
The day before, the WUR delegation brought a visit to LAD, where they spoke about potential projects for cooperation and signed an agreement for a training programme. Three WUR alumni are currently working at LAD; Didi Qian, Shang Haolyu and just recently joined Binzhen Du.
After the speeches, a Chinese meal was enjoyed and the alumni got to know each other better and enthusiastically connected by WeChat. Present from WUR were also Xiaoyong Zhang, China Strategy and Yutong Qiu, Business Developer Plant Sciences Group.