Being a teacher allows me chances to see thousands of personalities. Some of whose names may fade with time but faces stay; others might be the other way around. However, the face and name shall never slip my mind is Pengfei Zhang - a student of School of Chemistry in the academic year of 2020.

Our team was engaged in tumor pharmacology and buried with piles of high-intensity work, which made the days longer than they actually were. Yet our days in 2020 seemed to pass in a blink of an eye for the appearance of Pengfei Zhang. He was just like a source of vitality for our research group. Every day, he used his abundant energy to first complete his own experiments then inspired other students in the laboratory. Because of this, he has always been one of my favorite students.

He also showed strong powers of concentration on his own experiments irrespective of surrounding physical conditions. It was always scorching during summer in Kaifeng, and the enclosed laboratory fume hood and the ill-functioning air conditioner just added fuel to the fire. Notwithstanding the heat shock and the sweat beads, Zhang forgot all else once he was in his world of Chemistry.

Zhang was also an individual with excellent interpersonal skills. All of his feelings either positive or negative were vented reasonably so as not to bother others. Knowing how to express his aims and prove a certain experimental method more scientifically valid in the most elegant and sophisticated way was also one of the Zhang’s endowed skills. These skills have been neglected in the lab where graduate students are often either told to or instinctively just focus on their own research, which can hardly allow them to run far in this globalization era from my own point of view. Today's scientific life is indeed not the era of the lone hand. The larger-scale a project is, the more cooperation it requires. Because of his outstanding performance, he is now co-cultured in Chinese Academy of Sciences Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica (SIMM). Therefore, people with such skills as Zhang will have great advantages in their future life.

Although I have only been in contact with him for a year, he is one of the most outstanding students I value. I wish he could keep his positive mind and further nurture his communication skills, and I believe he will achieve his research goals sooner or later.

(From: School of Pharmacy)