Clark School's CALCE Connects with China

The Center for Advanced Life Cycle Engineering (CALCE) and the University of Maryland are strategic partners in a groundbreaking effort to develop an International University Research Park in the Chinese city of Suzhou, near Shanghai. UM President C. D. Mote, Jr., Clark School Dean Darryll Pines and CALCE Director Michael Pecht recently met with high-level officials from the Suzhou High Speed Railway Company and the Suzhou Xiangcheng District to finalize plans.

The aim of the Suzhou International University Research Park is to foster cooperative research between Chinese, European and U.S. researchers in a wide variety of areas. Their strategic planning partner is Kotler Marketing Group in the U.S. and China, working in collaboration with the Battelle Institute, CannonDesign and Lee and Associates. Plans include an organ transplant hospital, a personalized medicine program and engineering research centers, including a major center focused on failure analysis and prognostics and health management (PHM) of electronics.

The Suzhou research center for failure analysis and PHM will be guided by CALCE, the Clark School and their Chinese counterparts. Together they will establish a world-class failure analysis and safety modeling laboratory that will be a Center of Excellence in China. This center will bring great benefit to the entire international electronics industry as it develops new techniques and technologies to make virtually all electronic systems safer and more reliable.

Suzhou, a city of nearly 6 million located about 50 miles west of Shanghai, is a strategic place for CALCE and the University of Maryland to establish a cooperative research center. Suzhou boasts the presence of more than 100 Fortune 500 companies, including many of the world's largest electronics companies, which account for over US$100 billion in exports from Suzhou each year.

Published July 14, 2010