Overview of the College of Chemistry & Pharmacy

The College of Chemistry and Pharmacy was established on December 30, 2016. Its predecessor is the Department of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, School of Science, Northwest A&F University, and its history can be traced back to the Chemistry Teaching Section of National Northwest A&F College in 1934. The college started to recruit graduate students in 1987 and undergraduate students in 1999. Chemistry teachers and disciplines originated from the soil agrochemistry major established in 1934, and constantly adjusted settings. Professor Yu Hongzheng, a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a famous physical chemist. Professor Wu Zhonglu, a forest chemist who studied in the United States, and later analytical chemists cultivated by our school, Professor Xue Chengze, Professor Gong Baosen and Professor Fu Jianxi, who studied in Germany, etc. Generations of chemists have made painstaking efforts for Chinese agricultural chemistry, laying a foundation for the combination of chemistry, agriculture and forestry and our own development.

The college attaches great importance to the construction of talent team, vigorously implements the strategy of strengthening the college with talents according to the aim of "Double First Class University Plan", insists on introducing from outside and training from inside, continuously exerts its strength in training, using and supporting outstanding talents, and strives to build a team of teachers with noble morality, exquisite work, reasonable structure and full of vitality. The college comprises three departments: Department of Chemistry, Department of chemical biology and Department of pharmacy, with 142 faculty members, including 111 full-time teachers, 34 professors and 60 associate professors; There are more than 20 doctoral tutors and more than 50 master tutors, one academician, three national talents, one Elsevier "China Highly Cited Scholar", six “New Century Talent” from the Ministry of Education, two Teaching Masters in Shaanxi Province , two Shaanxi Young Talents, one young talent program from the think tank of China Association for Science and Technology, and 12 high-level talent development support programs from schools, and more than 93% of the teaching staff have doctoral degrees.

The college has four research institutions, including Shaanxi Key Laboratory of Chemical Biology of Natural Products, Shaanxi Traditional Chinese Medicine Fingerprint Research Technology Center, Shaanxi Resource Chemistry and Sustainable Utilization Engineering Research Center, and National and Local Joint Engineering Research Center of Traditional Chinese Medicine Fingerprint, one chemical experiment teaching demonstration center of Shaanxi universities, 52 teaching and research laboratories of various types, 11,000 m2 teaching and research rooms, more than 20 sets of advanced large-scale analysis and testing instruments and more than 2,000 sets of various instruments. In the past five years, the college has undertaken more than 100 scientific research projects with a contract fund of more than 30 million yuan; and has been authorized more than 30 patents; won 1 second prize of scientific and technological progress of the Ministry of Education and 4 provincial and ministerial science and technology awards; More than 500 SCI and EI research papers have been published, with an average output of 4.5 papers/person. The research results have been published in mainstream and famous international chemistry journals such as Nature Communications, Chemical Reviews, Chemical Society Review, Journal of the American Chemical Society and Angewandte Chemie International Edition.

At present, the college has one second-level doctoral degree authorization point (chemical biology), two first-level master's degree authorization points (chemistry and pharmacy), one professional master's degree authorization point (pharmacy) and two undergraduate majors (applied chemistry and chemical biology). There are 913 students in the college, including 491 undergraduates and 422 postgraduates (310 postgraduates and 112 doctoral students). There is one provincial teaching team in the college, which has won more than seven second prizes of school-level teaching achievements, including one national teaching achievement prize and three special prizes of Shaanxi Province. And 8 main edited textbooks have been awarded above the provincial level. More than 30 programs have been approved for curriculum construction and teaching reform at or above the school level, and the college published more than 100 teaching reform papers. Two national first-class courses, four provincial first-class courses and virtual simulation projects were added, six national planning textbooks were published, one national first-class major was identified, and 102 excellent experimental projects and ideological and political education cases were identified. The rate of undergraduates going on to graduate school is about 50%, and 15% of graduates go abroad or enter famous universities and institutes at home and abroad, such as Peking University, Tsinghua University and Chinese Academy of Sciences, to continue their further studies. They participate in publishing more than 10 high-quality papers (SCI) and are granted more than 10 patents; Postgraduates have obtained 5 provincial excellent doctoral dissertations and published more than 200 SCI dissertations, of which 12 have IF greater than 10. Postgraduates have won many academic newcomer awards for doctoral students from the Ministry of Education. "Eternal Rose" won the Gold Award of National College Students' Micro-entrepreneurship in 2015, and Ma Chongwen, a 2013 applied chemistry major, was selected as one of the top 100 national college students' entrepreneurial heroes in 2015. The college actively carries out exchanges and cooperation at home and abroad, and has signed joint school-running agreements with Lincoln University in Nebraska, University of Maryland, McGill University in Canada, Gottingen University in Germany, Queensland University in Australia and Vakhnin University in the Netherlands. In the past five years, experts from home and abroad have been invited to give more than 100 academic reports.

The college adheres to the Party's educational policy in an all-round way. Under the correct leadership of the Party Committee and administration of the university, it closely follows the fundamental task of “Establishing moral values and educating people”, and adheres to the direction of reform and innovation and serving the society, and resolutely serves the major strategic needs of "Healthy China". According to the construction idea of "High starting point, High standard, High level, Internationalization", it identifies the combination point and entry point of chemistry and pharmacy, and achieves breakthroughs in the discovery of New Precursor Molecules, the analysis of new target proteins and new action mechanisms. The college always takes discipline construction as its central work, closely focus on the goal and task of "double first-class" construction, promotes and drives the coordinated development of multi-disciplines in the college by means of consolidating the foundation and integrating according to the "connotative" development idea, and continuously improves the overall discipline construction level. At present, the overall discipline construction of the college has entered a period of benign development, and the ranking of chemistry disciplines in authoritative institutions such as U.S.News World University Rankings and Soft Science "China's Best Discipline Rankings" has increased year by year; Great progress has been made in the fields of natural product chemistry, utilization of biological resources, chemical biology, etc., and it is in a leading position in domestic agricultural and forestry colleges; Our faculties in the college have made important contribution in entering top 1% of ESI in four disciplines: chemistry, pharmacology and toxicology, environment/ecology and materials science.

(Data updated: May 2023)