The opening ceremony of the International Symposium of Molecular Tree of Life: From Coalescence to Comparative Genomics was held at Crowne Plaza Xuzhou Dalong Lake at 9 o’clock on the morning of May 28. The symposium attracted Professor Scott V. Edwards from Harvard University, Professor David Sankoff from University of Ottawa, Professor Craig Moritz from Australian National University and other 46 scholars from home and abroad.

Over 100 representatives from School of Life Sciences attended the Symposium. Wang Weifeng, Party Secretary of CPC Xuzhou Tongshan District Committee, Gong Wei, member of the standing Committee of Xuzhou Tongshan District, Professor Hua Guihong, Party Secretary of CPC JSNU Committee, Professor Zheng Yuanlin, Vice President of JSNU attended the ceremony. Professor Zheng hosted the ceremony.

At the beginning, Professor Hua introduced JSNU and briefly interpreted the development of SLS. He hoped that teachers of JSNU related disciplines could cherish this opportunity, communicate with each other thoroughly and find guidance, support and help for improving discipline development, innovative capability, international cooperation and technology transferring. He added that, at the same time, we sincerely hoped that all experts and scholars could help and support JSNU related discipline and propose their valuable suggestions.

Then, Wang Weifeng addressed a speech to welcome all the guests, introducing the recent development of Tongshan District and expressing that Tongshan District would provide the best policies and service for the top international talents and entrepreneur teams in order to make them stay in Xuzhou comfortably.

At the conference, Professor Wu Shaoyuan, Director of JSNU Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Phylogenomics and Comparative Genomics jointly signed cooperation agreement with Gong Wei.

After the conference, group photo was taken. In the next 3 days, there would be 21 experts and scholars came to Xuzhou for academic lectures.