Chair Prof. Mohamad Sawan was interviewed by CCTV and CGTN: In the eyes of a top scientist who moved to China 6 years ago

Recently, Dr. Mohamad Sawan, Chair Professor at Westlake University and Founding Director of the CenBRAIN Neurotech Center of Excellence, was interviewed by CCTV and CGTN. He introduced his six-year research journey and academic achievements in China.

For the full report, please click the link below:

Foreign Scientist in China: In the eyes of a top scientist who moved to China 6 years ago 

An academician of the Canadian Academy of Engineering, an academician of the Engineering Institute of Canada, and an academician of the Royal Society of Canada, he is one of the most influential scholars in the world in the field of implantable and wearable intelligent medical devices based on intelligent microsystem technology. In 2018, he joined Westlake University full-time, becoming the Chair Professor of Microsystems and Bioengineering, and the founding director of the CenBRAIN Neurotech Center of Excellence. How does he view Chinese-style modernization after working in China for six years?

At the age of 19, he left his homeland, Lebanon, to study in Canada and worked in Canada for more than 30 years. Professor Sawan himself has a cross-cultural background, so he always has a very open attitude towards different civilizations. He has a lasting and strong curiosity about Chinese civilization: why has this civilization never been interrupted for five thousand years? How has China revived? Even though he frequently visited China as a scientist for more than 20 years, his visits were always short.

In 2020, Professor Sawan obtained a Chinese green card, and in 2023, he became one of the first foreigners in Zhejiang to receive the new version of the Chinese permanent residence 5-star card. At Westlake University, he was the second foreign professor to be recruited. He witnessed the establishment of this new type of research university, which is the first in the history of New China to be run by social forces and receive key support from the state. His most personal experience of Chinese-style modernization is the growth of Westlake University.

Sawan said that numbers alone cannot fully explain the issue. Westlake University is a high-starting-point, small but refined, research-oriented university. It does not win by numbers but by hiring top scholars in their respective fields from around the world.

For example, Sawan has a team of 60 people here, nearly double the size of his team in Canada. Moreover, brain-machine interfaces research is a frontier discipline that spans biology and engineering, with very high thresholds and difficult conditions for comprehensive experiments.

Although brain-machine interfaces research is still very young in China, in some sub-fields, such as custom-chip based research in "biomedical circuits and systems," China has made astounding leaps in the past decade.

Why has China been able to achieve such great progress in a short time? Professor Sawan believes that there is a systemic driving force in China. Once China prioritizes something, its determination and strong effort to promote it are rare in the world.