Researcher empowers future innovators

Students provide sustainable fixes to rural challenges

This May Day holiday, Zhou Chuanbin returned to Gannian village in Sichuan province, where he has spent the last seven holidays with science-loving middle school students.

"Among researchers, the fear of speaking to oneself is most prevalent," said 44-year-old Zhou, a researcher at the Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, standing in front of a newly built ecological monitoring station, with an electronic screen behind him displaying real-time pond water quality data.

In 2011, when he first encountered rural environmental protection projects, his high-tech ecological solutions repeatedly hit roadblocks: intelligent compost bins were being used by villagers as chicken coops, and environmental protection systems had been abandoned due to their complexity.