Robert O. Ritchie talked to the reporter of People’s Daily with confidence and assurance in his office in the new main building in Beihang University. Robert Oliver Rich is not only a professor in University of California, Berkeley and the chief scientist of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, but also an internationally acclaimed expert in fatigue and fracture of materials and an academician of the National Academy of Engineering (USA) and Royal Academy of Engineering (UK).

Ritchie was appointed an honorary professor of Beihang University in 2009 and recruited into the sixth “Thousand Talents” program in 2011. In September 2012, he was invited to head the International Research Center for Biological and Nature-Inspired Materials of the International Research Institute for Multidisciplinary Science (IRIMS), which was founded by Beihang on the basis of the innovative and venture bases for overseas top talents. Ritchie said that he took “the right path” by joining the institute. He said that the “Thousand Talents” program is a huge success in the sense that it not just attracted top notch Chinese talents overseas back home but also helped recruit many foreign experts.

Asian countries are facing the challenge of promoting innovation capability and education is the soil that fosters such capability, Ritchie stressed. Some institutions of higher learning such as Tsinghua University are striving to build world-class universities, and China’s educational communities should not be afraid of failure in the pursuit of improving the capacity of innovation, he added.

Ritchie placed emphasis on the importance of cooperation in the conversation. He makes several visits to China every year and thus China has become his hometown in the east. He believes China’s infrastructure construction projects overseas provide important opportunities to expand the application of material science in China. Ritchie told the reporters: “Precious orchids will bloom as long as you are willing to spend time and energies cultivating the seeds. Today, I am planting the seeds China. The material science will be full of vitality and makes contributions to transforming China into an innovative country.”

The article is edited and translated from《在中国培育创新的种子（中国，我的第二故乡）》, source: People's Daily, author: Ji Peijuan