On October 30, DICP held the ceremony for Professor Zidong Wei as part-time professor. Afterwards, Professor Wei gave a lecture “Electrocatalysis & Fuel Cells”. Zhang Tao, the director of DICP, Gongquan Sun, the director of Divison of Fuel Cells, the officals of Science and Technology Department and graduate faculty, the researchers and graduates in the related field attended the meeting.
　　Professor Wei is the Dean of the college of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Ph.D. supervisor, Chongqing University, Chair professor of the Yangtze River scholar program, national candidate of “The New Century National Hundred, State Council Expert for Special Allowance. (Text DNL0301 Zhen Wang / Photo DNL0301 Yachao Zeng)
　　  

    On Oct. 27, 2014, Award Ceremony for Thomson Reuters China Citation Laureates 2014 was held at Beijing. One hundred eleven scientists of Mainland China won this honor. Prof. Gongquan Sun and Prof. Qin Xin of our institute joined the Award Ceremony as the winner of engineering field.

On Oct. 20-24, 2014, the 4th International Symposium on Solar fuels and Solar Cells (SFSC) and the 3rd DNL Conference on Clean Energy (DCCE) was held in the Convention Center of Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP). The symposium was co-chaired by Prof. Can Li from Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, and Prof. Licheng Sun from Dalian University of Technology. Prof. Hongxian Han organized the symposium as the Secretary General of the 4th SFSC.
Prof. Can Li chaired the opening Ceremony. Prof. Tao Zhang, the director of DICP gave a welcome speech, and Prof. Licheng Sun introduced the history of the series SFSC symposium which was held biannually since 2008. About 350 scientists, scholars, postdoctors and students from more than 15 countries and regions attended the symposium. Taking the 4 days presentation time, extensive presentations and discussion were carried out in all aspects of research fields in solar fuels and solar cells, including natural photosynthesis, artificial photosynthesis, photocatalytic water splitting, photocatalytic carbon dioxide reduction and conversion, emerging novel technologies, materials and processes for solar cells, as well as the key scientific and technical problems for efficient solar energy conversion.
The 4th SFSC symposium is more like the highly standard “Gordon Research Conference”, featuring 4 plenary lectures, 17 keynote lectures, 18 invited oral lectures, 22 ordinary lectures and more than 100 posters. The poster evaluation committee screened out 9 RSC Poster Prize Awards. Wangyin Wang, a PhD student from Solar Energy Division of DNL, Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics, was awarded the Gold Prize.
  
Solar energy is the most abundant renewable energy source on earth. Among the known renewable energy resources, only solar energy can replace the fossil fuels in large volume and quantity. To this end, research on solar energy conversion is vitally important for securing the global ecological civilization and sustainable economic development in the near future. Solar fuels and solar cells, the main themes of the SFSC symposium, are the two kinds of major solar energy conversion and utilization technologies under developing in the laboratory so far.
Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics has established a world-standard Solar Energy Division in Dalian National Laboratory for Clean Energy (DNL) with research focus on solar fuels and advanced solar cells. Successful organization of the 4th SFSC symposium will further strengthen the ties of DICP with other international institutes, and promote the research quality of DICP in the fields of solar fuels and solar cells.
The biannual SFSC symposium has been supported by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, National Natural Science Foundation of China etc. (Texy Hongxian Han and Jianing Guan/ Photos Wansheng Liu and Hongyu An)

Recently, new progress was made by the laboratory of Biomedical Materials Engineering (1802) with respect to the applications of marine biological polysaccharide. Such finding was published on the front cover of Macromolecular Rapid Communications (2014,18,1606–1610. DOI: 10.1002/marc.201400267).

Marine biological polysaccharide, such as sodium alginate, is biocompatible, biodegradable, widely distributed, and capable of enhancing body immunity, therefore, is widely used as biomedical material or durg delivery system. Base on the in-depth study of marine biological polysaccharide, a new trypsin-inhibition property of sodium alginate was described for the first time. The trypsin active site was prevented from accessing its substrate by means of alginate’s winding. It is confirm that the peroral delivered drug could be efficient protected from protease degraded by marine polysaccharide in this work, using anti-diabetic protein insulin as a model drug, and sodium alginate as a protease inhibitor. The Inhibition efficiency reached up to about 400 times than that of traditional inhibitors. Such inhibitor is a perfect functional carrier to overcome the oral delivery enzyme barriers of protein and peptide drugs, hence, has a broad application prospect in biotechnology and medicine.
This work was supported by the National Key Technology Research and Development Program of China (No. 2013BAB01B01), the Ocean Public Welfare Scientific Research Project of China (Grant No. 201405015-3) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 31271055).

Invited by Prof. Guowang Xu, Prof. Depei Liu (member of Chinese Academy of Engineering) from the Chinese Academy of Medical Science, Peking Union Medical College visited Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) on Oct. 24. In the conference hall of biotechnology department, he gave an excellent lecture about translational medicine research on cardiovascular diseases. Scientists from biotechnology department and the relevant research groups listened to the lecture.
Prof. Liu firstly summarized the incidences and the current scientific progression of cardiovascular diseases in China. He pointed out that cardiovascular diseases are still in rising stage in the following two decades. Based on his own study, he introduced the pathological roles of Sirt1 signal pathway in the development of cardiovascular diseases. Prof. Liu gave high praise for translational research in view of cardiovascular diseases and made some predictions about the potential aspects that translational research could get successful in near future.
Before the lecture, the director of DICP, Prof. Tao Zhang (member of the CAS) met Prof. Liu, and introduced the history, research fields and achievements, and future development strategy of DICP including the translational medicine scientific center which is being established. In the meantime, Prof. Liu had a lab tour to the metabolomics and proteomics laboratories. He gave very good evaluation to the platforms in our institute and showed great interest in conducting further cooperative researches on translational medicine, especially on lipidomics applications.
Prof. Liu has been addressing to gene expression regulation, genetic therapy and pathological mechanism research related to cardiovascular diseases for decades. He was the former deputy dean of Chinese Academy of Engineering, the president of Chinese Academy of Medical Science and the president of Peking Union Medical College. He is a member of standing committee of the National People’s Congress and a member of Academic Degree Commission of the State Council. (Text Peng Gao/ Photo Xiaoli Hou).
  

On October 15th, 2014, the 863 office of the Ministry of Science and Technology conducted the evaluation of the project "research and development of next-generation fuel cell system" in Dalian. Deputy Director of DICP Aisheng Feng, Academician Baolian Yi, Prof. Zhigang Shao and representatives of the relevant research teams attended the meeting. 
The project has made important progress on the key materials and components for fuel cells, including catalyst, proton exchange membrane, carbon paper, metal bipolar plate, etc. The developed fuel cell stacks assembled with metal bipolar plates achieve a great improvement on power density. These achievements can be applied in the fields of fuel cell vehicles, stationary power station etc. (Text Tang Xuejun / Photo by Zeng Yachao)