The First American Dean to Lead the Development of TU’s School of Pharmaceutical Science and Technology

In June, 2013, Californian organic chemist Jay S. Siegel was appointed Dean of the School of Pharmaceutical Science and Technology at Tianjin University (TU).

Jay S. Siegel is the first American Dean as well as the first dean of foreign origin at TU. He is recognized in his research as a world authority on stereochemistry and physical organic chemistry. As a highly regarded and respected scientist, teacher, and administrator, Dean Siegel will lead the School of Pharmaceutical Science and Technology to a new stage of development. He has moved to Tianjin for his vision of the school’s development. As he said in the article “American Takes Charge In Tianjin” by the author Jean-Francois Tremblay, “H (h)is vision—one that he says the leaders of the university entirely support—is to turn Tianjin’s school of pharmaceutical science into a world-class fundamental drug research center staffed by faculty who may or may not be Chinese-born and where the language of education is English.”

It showcased TU is on its way to build a world class university. “As far as I know, I am the first non-Chinese dean of a science school in China in at least 60 years,” Siegel says. If his efforts are successful, “they will mark another milestone in China’s steadily improving ability to invent and develop new drugs”, and that “foreign academics can function normally in China as researchers, professors, or administrators, just as foreign academics do in many other countries.” (from the article “American Takes Charge in Tianjin”)

It was over two years before Siegel became Dean of the School of Pharmaceutical Science & Technology of TU. It happened “during a dinner in Tianjin when he was in China as a visiting professor”. “It took two years of talks, but the university administration and I came up with a common vision.”

The author Jean-Francois Tremblay described Siegel would bring the deeper change to TU, Tianjin, as well as the whole China in his article.

“Siegel comes to Tianjin with a vast web of international connections from having worked for years on both sides of the Atlantic.” And he first “boosted international exchanges. A group of six Chinese students are currently on a two-month exchange program at his UZH labs to get more familiar with how Western labs are equipped, operated, and managed. Soon after their return to China, four of Siegel’s students who are still at Zurich will come to Tianjin, mostly to complete their Ph.D. studies but also to get a taste of life in China.”

Hiring of international faculty was his next move. “In coming years, Siegel foresees that the pharmacy school will hire about 80 new faculty, about 30 of whom, he estimates, would not be natives of China. The school currently employs about 30 academic staff. ‘We can offer internationally competitive packages that not many schools worldwide can outdo,” he says. And “over the next few years, the school will hire medicinal chemists, pharmacologists, pharmacokineticists, plant biologists, formulation scientists, and scientists from other related fields, Siegel envisages.”

Thomas J. Meade, a chemistry professor at Northwestern University, believed “Jay is combining under one roof multiple disciplines that will work together for a common purpose.” And that will “implement at the Tianjin school of pharmaceutical science some of the best practices that administrators of research institutes and university departments have implemented worldwide in recent years”.

According to Siegel, the school will not only teach science and technology, but teach and research regulatory affairs, ethics, and drug economics. The comprehensiveness of Tianjin’s program “will address a complaint among companies hiring scientists for drug discovery and development that Chinese grads aren’t knowledgeable about the field,” Siegel says.

The student population at TU’s School of Pharmaceutical Science & Technology is set to increase in line with the rising faculty members. In coming years, the intake of Ph.D. students will grow from the current 30 or so to about 100, Siegel says. Master’s degree candidates will number 150 in a few years, up from about 50 now. And the school will accept 200 undergraduates annually, up from about 60 now, Siegel foresees.

That  the language of instruction is English will not be a problem. In October 28, 2010, TU officially launched Internationalization Strategy, becoming the first Chinese university ever to do so. Geared to international standard, TU is now under construction of system of courses taught in English. This offers a good opportunity for the school to develop.

“To accommodate a larger population, the school is expanding and upgrading its facilities. The renovation of 32,000 sq ft of lab space started last summer is scheduled for completion early next month.” Once that is finished, Siegel says, a second phase of renovation will involve rebuilding an additional 130,000 sq ft of lab and office space. In addition, the planned construction of a new building will provide 85,000 sq ft of new space. “We’re looking at 2,000 sq ft of brand new lab space on average for each new faculty,” Siegel says.

Just as the author Jean-Francois Tremblay said, “Siegel’s appointment is making waves in China’s academic world. The director of the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, Kuiling Ding, says that he was extremely surprised when he heard the news. Scientists such as Siegel are people whom Chinese students seek for postdoc positions at labs abroad, not in China. To have Siegel leading a school in the country is remarkable, he says.”

TU President Li Jiajun hoped that Professor Siegel, by joining the school, can bring in breakthroughs for the development of the school and the university. He also stated that TU would support Professor Siegel in this endeavor. As Siegel put it, he and his partners in the school felt together as a family. He was grateful for such great platform, and he was confident that he will be able to operate effectively because Tianjin University officials are letting him operate the school of pharmaceutical science as a “free zone” where experimentation in research, teaching, and administration will be fostered.

Vice President Gequn Shu believed that Professor Siegel would bring in a more advanced educational philosophy, a rigorous altitude, his outstanding level of scientific research and his rich experience at world-class universities, to foster the internationalization of the school’s education and raise its academic and research level.

Jay S. Siegel was born in 1959 in Los Angeles. He earned a BSc in Chemistry from California State University - Northridge (1980), followed by an MA (1982) and PhD (1986) from Princeton working with Professor Kurt Mislow in the area of Structural Chemistry and Stereochemistry. During his studies at Princeton (1983), he received a Swiss Universities Grant (cf. Fulbright Grants) to study crystallography at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, with Professor Jack. D. Dunitz. After earning his Ph. D., he was awarded a NSF-CNRS postdoctoral fellowship (1985) to study supramolecular chemistry at the University of Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg with Jean-Marie Lehn. In 1996, he became Full Professor of chemistry at the University of California, San Diego. He was a US-NSF Presidential Young Investigator (1988), an American Cancer Society Jr. Fellow (1990), an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow (1992), and an Arthur C. Cope Scholar by the ACS (1998). He was elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1998) and the Royal Society of Chemistry (2007). In 2003, he was appointed as Professor and co-director of the Organic Chemistry Institute of the University of Zurich and Director of its laboratory for process chemistry research (LPF).