Page 48 - Acoustics Today Summer 2011

COLLABORATING WITH CHINESE SCIENTISTS
Whitlow W. L. Au
Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology PO Box 1106, Kallua, Hawaii 96734
Fig. 1. Peter Narins, Albert Feng, Shen Jun-Xian and wife.
Acoustics 2012 Hong Kong will include the 163rd meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) and it will be a historical one. This will be the first joint meeting of the ASA with the Acoustical Society of China, along with the Hong Kong Institute of Acoustics and WESPAC. It will also be the first meeting of the ASA on Asian soil which will provide a unique opportunity for members of the ASA to engage Chinese scientists and perhaps develop mutually beneficial relationships and collaborations. Many things can happen at such an inter- national meeting and this article will provide examples of such occurrences.
In 1992 Drs. Peter Narins, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Albert Feng, University of Illinois, and Phillip Jen, University of Missouri, attended an International Congress on Acoustics (ICA) in Bejing. As a result of that meeting, they were invited to deliver a series of lectures by Professor Wang Shu-Rong, the director of the Institute of Biophysics. During the lecture series, they met Professor Shen Jun-Xian, an auditory physiologist who paved the way for field work on an extraordinary frog in the Huangshan National Park in Anhui Province, China in 2000. Previously, Albert met Xu Chun-He, a Ph.D. student in his own depart- ment who eventually hosted Peter and Albert in their field expedition in 2000. Xu Chun-He eventually became a profes- sor at the Shanghai Institute of Life Science at the Chinese Academy of Science. He not only provided critical logistic and bureaucratic support, but also several extraordinarily tal- ented and helpful students to serve as field assistants, in exchange for instruction in techniques for conducting bio- logical field research.
This collaboration led to the first publications docu- menting the ability of those frogs to produce and detect ultrasonic sounds. With the retirement of Professor Xu Chun-He, Narins and Feng began collaborating with Shen
Jun-Xian (Fig. 1). Since 2005, Shen has been involved in all aspects of the project and has been a coauthor on every subsequent publica- tion that has emerged from the work. Narins and Feng performed the original peripheral and central auditory physiological recordings in Professor Shen’s laboratory in Beijing and moreover, he, as well as his wife and students, have participated in every joint field trip involving those frogs since 2005. Recently, with the impending retirement of Professor Shen, and with a desire to study a second species of frog with putative ultrasonic sensi- tivity, Narins and Feng began collaborating with Professor Jiang Jianping, at the Chengdu Institute of Biology at the Chinese Academy of Science, Sichuan Province. Narins and Feng have found their scientific collaboration
with Chinese scientists to be fruitful, interesting, productive, but at times frustrating and challenging.
At the same ICA in Bejing (1992), Dr. Larry Crum of the University of Washington (UW), met Professor Rong Jue Wei, director of the Institute of Acoustics in Nanjing. Their labora- tory visits revealed of a number of mutual interests. These vis- its resulted in student exchanges in which Dr. Crum accepted several Chinese students into his group while continuing their education in the US. One individual, Juan Tu, (Fig. 2) was an exceptional student at UW, and returned to Nanjing as a facul- ty member. With the passing of Professor Wei, Juan Tu has served as a close contact with the students there, and she has
Fig. 2. Larry Crum and Juan Tu.
44 Acoustics Today, July 2011