Dr Bo Li won 2022 Bao Steel Excellent Teacher's Award
09 December 2022
Bo Li, Associate Professor in Structural Engineering, Civil Engineering Undergraduate Course Director
On October 2022, Dr Bo Li, Associate Professor in Structural Engineering from the Faculty of Science and Engineering, was awarded the "2022 Bao Steel Excellent Teacher's Award".
Funded by Bao Steel Education Foundation, Bao Steel Excellent Teacher’s Award aims to award frontline young Chinese teachers working in universities in China. Established in 1990, it is a well-known and influential award funded by the state-owned enterprise, supported and guided by the government, consulted and planned by experts, and actively participate by China mainstream universities.
Bo Li, Associate Professor in Structural Engineering, Civil Engineering Undergraduate Course Director. He was awarded “Zhejiang Province Higher Education Outstanding Young Talent”, “Ningbo 3315 Individual Innovation Talent” and “Ningbo Leading and Top Talent”. Dr Bo Li’s research interests focus on eco-friendly high-performance building materials and structures, including novel low-carbon binders, high performance cementitious materials, and solid waste recycling/reusing technologies. The main goal of his research is to enhance the sustainability of the construction industry. He has been awarded research grants from National Natural Science Foundation of China, Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China, and Ningbo Science and Technology Bureau. He has published more than 70 journal papers, including more than 50 SCI journal papers. He has been the inventor for 3 Chinese patents and 2 US patents.
In August 2016, Dr Bo Li officially joined University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC) and began his academic career in the Department of Civil Engineering. "As the first sino-foreign university in China, UNNC attaches great importance to the cultivation of students' independent thinking and critical thinking. I believe that I can pass on knowledge to students at UNNC, and continue to take advantage of my expertise in the research field.” Bo said.
Bo really enjoys living in Ningbo, not only because of its convenient and international lifestyle, but also because Ningbo has many pillar enterprises in the field of environmental protection and new materials, which are potential industry-university-research cooperation partners. UNNC also has an excellent research environment. Bo said, "The university gives us sufficient space for development, and we can explore our own scientific research direction according to our expertise and experience." Bo has also encountered considerable challenges when he first joined UNNC. With the support from colleagues, Bo quickly adapted to the teaching and research work here.
Bo attaches great importance to the cultivation of students' professionalism. He would carefully sort out and update the course materials before every class and summarise it after classes. This is also a virtuous cycle of continuous improvement for his teaching.
In addition, the renewal of teaching content is an important guarantee to ensure that the knowledge meets the needs of modern society development. Bo actively understands the professional development trend, cutting-edge technology and market demand, and adjusts and updates the teaching content in a timely manner. The students can access cutting-edge professional knowledge, which greatly stimulates students’ curiosity for new things related to their majors. For example, the emergence of new environmental-friendly building materials provides new choices for construction, which was not mentioned in the current textbook. Through reviewing relevant books and the latest research papers, he summarised and explained these new technologies in class. This can promote students’ understanding of the future industry trend. Civil Engineering is a typical engineering major, Bo always adheres to the teaching concept of combining theoretical knowledge with practical applications. By introducing real-world designing and construction cases, he enables students to grasp and understand professional knowledge more intuitively. Bo's enthusiastic teaching attitude is unanimously recognised by the students.
The innovation of teaching methods is important for the improvement of teaching quality. In order to enable students to choose their study direction according to their preference, the Civil Engineering programme offers a module named “Portfolio of Civil Engineering Studies”, which converts the traditional courses into various components in different disciplines, many of which are cross-professional. These modules and their cross-disciplinary nature are very helpful to students for their further study and future career.
"We incorporated the concept of 'Continuing Professional Development (CPD)’ into this module. Students submit an action plan for personal development at the beginning of the academic year, followed by a self-reflection on the learning process to adjust the action plan at the mid of the academic year. At the end, we will ask students to submit a summary report stating their academic achievements and describing their future study plans. This learning cycle in this module trains the students on how to continuously improve their professional knowledge. Our colleagues also encourage students to keep learning new knowledge and follow their interests in the future." Bo introduced.
Engineering practice and site visits are also important parts of engineering courses, which provide opportunities for students to connect their theoretical knowledge with engineering practice. Bo always leads students to visit construction sites. He has organised different batches of civil engineering students to go to the construction sites of the new library and the Incubator on campus, as well as the demonstrate site for prefabricated steel developed by the Ningbo Construction Engineering Group Co., LTD. In addition, he is also keen to strengthen cooperations with the industry, providing a platform for student internships and industry-university-research cooperation. Under the liaison of Bo, the university successfully signed a cooperation framework agreement with the Ningbo Preca Construction Technology Co., LTD in 2019 for the collaborations in the undergraduate internship, talent training, and scientific research. The effective integration of classroom teaching and field trips improves the combination of extracurricular activities and professional teaching, encourages students to integrate theoretical knowledge into practice, and enriches students' learning experiences.
Bo values students' interests and majors greatly, and aims to cultivate all-round talents who can adapt to social development. He fully stimulates students' enthusiasm in learning and encourages them to develop independent thinking and learning skills as well as innovative abilities. He actively leads the summer research interns to carry out scientific research, which can enhance their understanding of frontier scientific research, cultivate and improve their scientific research skills. Bo said, "During the summer vacation in 2018, one of our undergraduate projects impressed me a lot. He collected discarded glass bottles, and crushed them into fine particles as supplementary cementitious materials. This green material can be used to replace part of the cement in building materials. This idea reduces the carbon emission of building materials to a certain extent, which is an environmentally friendly building material, especially in line with the "carbon peak and carbon neutrality ” goals. We hope to integrate the concept of waste recycling and reuse into real-world construction. We are going to put more efforsts in this research area, and carry out cooperation with more enterprises, so as to refine and implement the technology, and make our own contribution to the environmental protection."
In addition, he always encourages students to participate in subject-related competitions. These meaningful competitions are beneficial to students’ analytical skills, research experience, and problems-solving ability from a multidisciplinary perspective, which also broadens their horizons, improves their hands-on skills and enhances their sense of teamwork. Bo knows that as the supervisor, his words and deeds will have an impact on students' attitude towards scientific research and even their future scientific research career. He always holds himself to the strictest standards and leads by example. His love, devotion and efforts to scientific research set a good example for his students.
Growing together with UNNC for more than 6 years, Bo saw the growth of many students. He said, "When I first came to UNNC, I led some undergraduates to do experiments and collected data for their individual investigative projects, and I witnessed their rapid improvement in the professional ability and scientific research level. Our undergraduates also published several research papers, and we are very proud of their achievements." As the course director, Bo will continue to optimise the management of the civil engineering curriculum, so that students can get a solid professional training from the core modules, learn professional skills from the modular modules, and touch real world practice from the group design project modules. This ensures that every student learns the key knowledge and skills and know to apply them in the real-world projects.
First of all, I would like to thank Baosteel Education Foundation for its strong support, which is also an affirmation of my past teaching and scientific research application materials is also the process of summarizing and reflecting on my work in the pasch achievements in UNNC. The process of preparing t few years. In addition, I am very grateful for the support of the University, the Faculty and the UNNC Education Foundation. Teaching and scientific research can support each other, and I will put efforts in both aspects. This precious honour inspires me to make breakthroughs, innovate and challenge myself in both teaching and research in future.
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