Beijing, China - May 25, 2009
Dow Chemical (China) Company Limited today announced the winners of the Dow Sustainability Innovation Student Challenge Award in Peking University. Each award recipient or winning team will receive USD 10,000 in prizes to recognize their exemplary work contributing to the development of solutions to address global sustainability challenges.
“Dow is pleased to have run this unique program with the Peking University, where we had seen the ingenuity and creativity of the students in China and the actions they take to help address sustainability challenges.” said Jim McIlvenny, Senior Vice President of Emerging Economies, The Dow Chemical Company. “Sustainable chemistry is at the heart of Dow’s business, and this global program is a demonstration of our ongoing efforts in fostering the next generation of sustainability leaders in China and around the world.”
“Peking University is delighted to participate in this meaningful global initiative of Dow,” says Lin Jianhua, Executive Vice President of the Peking University. “Peking University has always been at the forefront of promoting sustainable development in China, and we are honored to partner with Dow to showcase our capabilities in addressing the challenges the world is facing.”
Initiated in 2008, this recognition program was established based on Dow’s 2015 sustainability goals, which Dow had set and announced in 2006 after a previous set of EH&S goals were successfully accomplished. The 2015 goals put more focuses on Dow’s efforts on strengthening its relationships within the communities where it operates, continuing to improve our product stewardship and innovation to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems, and to reduce global footprint. It aims to promote the development of innovative, sustainable and interdisciplinary solutions to addressing world challenges. Six universities worldwide were selected to participate to the Program, including: Northwestern University, Tufts University, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, Cambridge University, Peking University and University of Sao Paulo.
This program is funded by the Dow Chemical Company Foundation. Eligible areas of research in 2008 included sustainable chemistry, energy efficiency and conservation, reducing climate change impact, life cycle product safety, and sustainable freshwater supply and distribution. Winning entries were selected by the university with the high-level criteria as following:
- Winning work should have a potentially significant impact on sustainability, have scalable attributes, and be useful to society.
- Winning work should demonstrate innovative thinking and excellence in research, such as a well-crafted premise and convincing research data.
- Winning work should bear the potential of solving significant problems or the identified challenge problem.
The three winning teams had been focused on their studies on new generation coal, natural gas and biomass based transportation fuels, transition-metal-catalyzed novel transformations and the development of air-guard online instrument for peroxyacyl nitrates(PANs)and its sound applications in China respectively.
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