On April 25, Dr. Yang Yanpeng from the School of Chemical Engineering finished his livestream defense of doctoral dissertation through Tencent Meeting, an audio and video conference app, at his home at Yixing city of Jiangsu Province. He is the first doctoral student at Tianjin University to try online defense.

On the other side of the screen were six professors of the Defense Committee, attending the meeting from Harbin, Xi’an and Beijing. More than 50 teachers and students in related research areas sat in on the defense.

Dr. Yang reported on his research work, especially the innovative part of his dissertation and answered the questions raised by the committee. Then, the defense committee were left alone in the online meeting to discuss the resolution of the defense. To ensure a fair and impartial voting, a professional online questionnaire survey platform named Wenjuanxing was used to collect the ballots of the committee members. By full votes, the committee agreed that Dr. Yang successfully defended his dissertation and was qualified to receive a doctor degree in engineering.

“This online defense is a prelude to reforming our university’s traditional way of organizing degree defenses”, Zheng Gang, the Executive Vice-President of Tianjin University’s Graduate School noted. He proposed that this online defense mode was very promising for joint cultivation of doctoral students across countries and borders.

It is reported that over 3000 graduate students at Tianjin University will go through dissertation defense this term, and online defense is an option for them in terms of epidemic control and prevention.

By Eva Yin

Editor：Eva Yin