Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Shanghai Jiao Tong University is one of China’s most prestigious and selective universities, enjoying a growing global reputation for its impressive research outputs.

Founded in 1896 by a civil servant, the institution gained a reputation for its expertise for nurturing top engineers and scientists, becoming known as the ‘Eastern MIT’.

It took the English name ‘Jiao Tong’ in the 1950s – meaning ‘transportation’ – with the institution becoming largely a specialised engineering university for many decades.

However, it acquired a medical school in 2005 and has since grown rapidly across five different campuses, covering a wide variety of science, technology, arts and humanities subjects.

It now has more than 60 undergraduate programmes covering nine major disciplines - economics, law, literature, science, engineering, agriculture, medicine, management and arts – with more than 16,000 undergraduates and more than 280,000 postgraduates, including more than 6,000 doctoral candidates on around 200 programmes. It also has 11 state laboratories and national engineering research centres.

The university’s faculty includes around 2,800 full-time academics, of whom 890 are professors, with 22 members of Chinese Academy of Sciences and 24 members of Chinese Academy of Engineering.

Allied to its highly-regarded research, outstanding education remains a cornerstone of the university’s ethos. It has 12 national teaching development centres, nine national off-campus practice education bases and six national experimental teaching demonstration centres among other initiatives.

Among its highly-acclaimed alumni are former Chinese premier Jiang Zemin, early computer pioneer An Wang, and Chen Zhu, a molecular biologist who rose to become China’s minister of health.

Several sports stars have also attended the university including snooker player Ding Junhui and Yao Ming, the 7ft 6ins All-Star basketball centre and China team captain, who represented Houston Rockets in the American NBA for many years.

On research, the university is widely seen as one of China’s best performing institutions, winning the most amount of money from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, for six years in a row up to 2015.

Around 5,400 Science Citation Index papers were published in 2014, the second-highest among all the universities in China. The total number of SCI-cited papers from 2005 to 2014 reaches 35,488, with 308,723 times of citation, ranking the second in China.

Eight papers were included in the four most prestigious journals (Science, Nature, Cell and PNAS) in 2014, ranking the fourth in China, while 7,712 sci-tech papers were published domestically.

The university also has a very active alumni network, with regional associations in Japan, Singapore, Shenzhen, Silicon Valley, Northern California and South California.