【Words from a Distinguished Teacher】
- True engineering education takes place in the field—our classroom is not only in lecture halls, but across the land of our country.
- Research must identify real problems and solve real problems.
- The success of my students is my greatest success.
“There is nothing particularly special about me—I simply do my research conscientiously and devote myself wholeheartedly to teaching in our field.” Despite receiving the First Prize of the Teaching Excellence Award, Professor Che Ailan has remained remarkably humble. Her attitude is a true reflection of eighteen years of quiet dedication and selfless commitment on the front line of education.
As one of the few female faculty members in the field of civil engineering, Professor Che Ailan has worked closely with soil, rock, and earth for three decades. The front lines of major national engineering projects and disaster emergency sites have been both her primary arenas for research and the most authentic and vivid settings for her teaching. She firmly believes that engineering education must be grounded in real problems and real-world contexts: the classroom is not confined to lecture halls, but should lead students to the places where the nation needs them most, helping them truly understand their discipline and establish a clear sense of purpose.
Advancing Teaching Innovation: Keeping Professional Courses Aligned with the Times
Despite a demanding research schedule, Professor Che Ailan has remained steadfast on the teaching frontline, undertaking both undergraduate and graduate teaching every year. In response to the civil engineering major being jokingly labeled by students as “earthy and rigid,” she offers a distinctive perspective: “Civil engineering is a discipline that begins with soil and ultimately returns to mountains and rivers. Beyond being practical, it must also keep pace with the times and embrace interdisciplinary integration.”
In response to the new wave of technological revolution and industrial transformation, Professor Che Ailan has actively explored emerging directions such as intelligent civil engineering and smart disaster prevention. By deeply integrating artificial intelligence and big data with traditional civil engineering, she has driven innovative development within the discipline. She carried out a “surgical-style” overhaul of the course Civil Engineering Testing Technology—removing outdated content, adding frontier modules such as “intelligent sensing” and “big data analytics,” and upgrading the course to Intelligent Detection and Monitoring Technology. Grounded in the major needs of national infrastructure development, this reform transforms cutting-edge application scenarios—such as engineering monitoring under complex geological conditions and machine-learning-based intelligent diagnostics—into vivid teaching cases. Through analysis of the Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macao Bridge health monitoring system, she guides students to explore methods for fusing multi-source heterogeneous data; using geological hazard early warning for the Qinghai–Tibet Railway as a case study, she cultivates students’ hands-on ability to solve engineering challenges through digital approaches.
Under guidance, students engage in hands-on practice to construct engineering models.
“Sometimes when I teach, I tell my students that I didn’t say it this way last year, or that I once held a critical view at a previous conference,” Professor Che admits candidly. “With such rapid development across disciplines, even I feel pressed to keep learning.” From listening to sounds by striking with a hammer, to integrated equipment and digitalized acoustics; from using microphones to smartphone-based testing, and further to intelligent inspection and robotics research, she has consistently guided her students to stay at the forefront of the discipline.
The Field as the Classroom: Grounding Education in the Land of Our Nation
Civil engineering is a highly practice-oriented discipline: beyond solid theoretical foundations, students must understand real needs and refine their skills through hands-on experience. As an expert in geotechnical disaster prevention and mitigation, Professor Che Ailan has consistently upheld the teaching philosophy that “the field is the classroom,” taking major national engineering sites and disaster emergency frontlines as the primary arenas for educating and cultivating talent.
During her studies abroad, she personally experienced the 1995 Great Hanshin (Kobe) Earthquake in Japan and participated in scientific investigations of the Chi-Chi Earthquake in Taiwan, the Sendai earthquake in Japan, and the earthquake in western India, gaining a profound understanding of the critical importance of seismic resilience and disaster mitigation. When the devastating Wenchuan Earthquake struck in 2008, Che Ailan—then a young faculty member who had been on campus for only one year—rushed to the disaster area at the earliest opportunity to assist with post-earthquake damage assessments and the formulation of emergency response plans. Amid continuous aftershocks and ever-present danger, she deeply felt the nation’s urgent need for technological breakthroughs in major disaster prevention and control, which further strengthened her resolve to devote herself to the field of disaster mitigation.
“Disaster prevention and mitigation is never an armchair exercise. In our field, one defining reality is that out of 365 days a year, more than 200 are spent on construction sites and in the field,” Professor Che Ailan explains. After the 2019 Changning earthquake in Sichuan, she led an SJTU emergency assessment team of six students to the disaster area at the earliest opportunity. Each day, the team walked tens of thousands of steps—entering houses riddled with cracks, climbing onto the roofs of unstable buildings, and traversing mountain paths threatened by falling rocks—often collecting first-hand data while walking a fine line between safety and danger. While local residents slept at night, the team organized and analyzed the data gathered during the day; at dawn, they were already crossing another mountain ridge, beginning a new round of disaster assessment.
Over the past eighteen years, Che Ailan has developed a hands-on education model centered on the principle that “the field is the classroom.” She has led more than 50 students in emergency response efforts following earthquakes in Minxian–Zhangxian, Changning, Yangbi, and Jishishan, among others. Through this work, her team proposed assessment models for earthquake-induced landslide susceptibility, affected populations, and building vulnerability, providing quantitative analytical methods to support disaster prevention and mitigation in regions exposed to high-intensity seismic impacts.
Leading a team of students at the Jishishan earthquake site
To date, this model has supported more than 20 emergency assessment missions, with over 200 student participations in total. Through direct, hands-on involvement, students have developed a deeper appreciation of the profound impact that technology can have in empowering grassroots disaster prevention. “When we use our professional expertise to help residents determine whether their homes are safe,” Che Ailan reflects, “the light in the students’ eyes is something no classroom lecture could ever provide.”
Focusing on Real Needs: Developing Real Skills Through Real Problems
With the rapid advancement of China’s infrastructure development, a growing number of complex challenges have emerged that urgently require solutions. How to apply research to address the real needs of national economic and social development has long been a guiding question that Che Ailan consistently poses to her team and students. Leading her group with the mission of tackling critical “bottleneck” problems in major engineering projects, she has devoted herself to fundamental theoretical research and technological breakthroughs in the safe construction, operation, and maintenance of infrastructure. As she firmly believes, “Research must identify real problems, and engineering research must be aimed at truly solving them.”
In 2018, the team undertook a National Key R&D Program project, launching research on high-speed railway safety along major national strategic corridors such as the Beijing–Shanghai and Qinghai–Tibet routes. She led her students to work day and night for three months, traveling across railway lines nationwide to conduct round-the-clock field testing and data analysis, ultimately developing a high-speed railway inspection equipment system with independent intellectual property rights. Under her guidance, students also developed intelligent inspection equipment based on full-wavefield elastic waves, which has been widely applied in immersed tunnel foundation engineering, shield tunneling grouting projects, and substructure inspection of high-speed railways. These technologies provide monitoring and inspection solutions for critical infrastructure including rail transit systems, tunnels, urban roads, and reservoir dams, ensuring safety and reliability during operation and maintenance. The related achievements have received multiple honors, including the Second Prize of the Ministry of Education Science and Technology Progress Award and the First Prize of the China Highway & Transportation Society Science and Technology Progress Award.
Leading a team of students to conduct in-tunnel testing for the immersed tube tunnel of Shanghai’s Outer Ring Tunnel
In the summer of 2017, a road collapse occurred in Nantong. Peng Dong, who had followed Professor Che from undergraduate through doctoral studies, brought road inspection equipment to the accident site for the first time. Within a one-kilometer radius of the collapse area, he accurately identified nine potential hazard points, effectively preventing secondary disasters. Under Professor Che’s guidance, Peng Dong’s research achievements went on to win multiple honors, including the Gold Award at the “Chuangqingchun” National College Students’ Entrepreneurship Competition and the Gold Award at the China International College Students’ Innovation Competition. Today, the technology company founded by Peng Dong has served more than 40 cities and 104 districts nationwide, successfully detecting over 10,000 underground hazard points of various types, with its inspection equipment iterated through three generations of upgrades. Notably, Che Ailan holds no shares in the company and receives no remuneration, continuing to mentor the young team solely in her role as an academic advisor.
Students trained through this “real-problem-oriented” research and education model have demonstrated clear advantages. In recent years, members of the team have received honors such as the National Scholarship for Doctoral Students and the Liu Huixian Earthquake Engineering Scholarship. Graduates have gone on to contribute to western development and grassroots construction, taking root in research institutes and high-tech enterprises. From municipal infrastructure operation and maintenance to high-speed railway track safety, from urban road cavity detection to the emergency construction of Huoshenshan and Leishenshan hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic, Professor Che’s students have consistently risen to the occasion—standing firm at critical moments and proving reliable in times of urgency—fulfilling their mission and responsibility through professional expertise.
At a critical juncture in the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, the civil engineering discipline may face challenges, yet major national projects have never paused—from the Sichuan–Tibet Railway and plateau hydropower to urban renewal and disaster prevention and mitigation, all demand dedicated, pragmatic engineers capable of solving real problems. Speaking with deep emotion at the university’s symposium celebrating the 41st Teachers’ Day, Professor Che Ailan remarked, “Our SJTU students must always rely on solid professional competence to face change and challenges with composure, to see further ahead, and to recognize the responsibilities and value they may shoulder in the future. For me, cultivating talents for the new era means nurturing young people who can ‘shoulder mountains and rivers while holding fast to their original aspiration.’” Without grand rhetoric—only steadfast companionship with soil and rocks, and leading by example—Professor Che has, over eighteen years of unwavering commitment, embodied the original mission of a university educator. Her reverence for the profession and sense of responsibility, conveyed through every word and deed, have inspired generation after generation of outstanding engineers who possess both professional excellence and a deep sense of national commitment.
【Profile of a Distinguished Teacher】
Che Ailan is a recipient of the First Prize of Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s Teaching Excellence Award. She is a Changjiang-appointed Research Fellow (tenured-track), Doctoral Supervisor, at the School of Naval Architecture, Ocean and Civil Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. She has long been engaged in teaching and research in geotechnical engineering for disaster prevention and mitigation, and has led more than ten national-level projects, including National Key R&D Program projects and key projects funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China. She has published over 200 academic papers, holds more than 30 authorized invention patents, and her research achievements have received five provincial- and ministerial-level science and technology awards. She has also been honored as an SJTU “March 8 Red-Banner Pace-setter.” To date, she has supervised more than 50 graduate students, many of whom have become key professionals in the industry.
Source: School of Ocean and Civil Engineering; Party Committee Teachers’ Affairs Office; News Center
Translated by: Zara
Proofread by: Rebecca
