On April 17th, Nils Christian Stenseth was conferred Honorary Professorship of Tsinghua University at Gongziting. Prof. Nils Christian Stenseth is the Rector of the University of Oslo (UiO), and the member/fellow of several academies：Academia Europaea, French Académie des Sciences, The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS), the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Royal Norwegian Society of Science and Letters. Qiu Yong, President of Tsinghua University, received Professor Svein Stolen. Xue Qikun, as the Vice President of Tsinghua University, and Gong Peng, as the Dean of the Faculty of Science and the Director of the Department of Earth System Sciences (DESS), attended the meeting.

During the meeting, Qiu introduced the history of cooperation between Tsinghua and Uio. Qiu also congratulated Professor Nils Christian Stenseth for becoming an Honorary Professor of Tsinghua and hoped he would become a bridge between the two institutions.

Afterwards, Qiu Yong formally conferred the title of Honorary Professorship of Tsinghua to Professor Stenseth. Currently, Nils Christian Stenseth is the only Norwegian having received the Honorary Professorship of Tsinghua University.

After the appointment ceremony, Nils Christian Stenseth gave a speech on “Past and Present Plague Research - China-Norway Cooperation Project”. He reviewed the plague's harm to humans during the third epidemic disease (since 1900) period. Then he introduced the cooperation projects between China and Norway in detail. Finally, Prof. Stenseth gave an outlook about the future cooperation between Norway and China in ecology, evolution, genomics, statistics, and mathematics models.

Nils Christian Stenseth was born in 1947, Norway. He is the director of the Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis (CEES) at the University of Oslo, as well as the member of the member/fellow of the Royal Norwegian Society of Science and Letters, Academia Europaea, French Académie des Sciences, The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS), National Academy of Sciences (Washington, US), and the Russian Academy of Sciences.

His research interests include: Population biology (ecology and genetic structuring); large-scale ecological and evolutionary patterns; effects (ecology and evolution) of climate variation; terrestrial, marine and freshwater systems, including vector-borne infectious diseases with an environmental reservoir. Professor Stenseth published a total of 727 papers. He is the most cited natural scientist in all research fields in Norway in the past decade. He was ranked as the fifth most highly cited ecologist in Europe.

Prof. Stenseth enthusiastically cooperates with Chinese ecological colleagues. He has

published papers on famous academic journals, such as the PNAS, in collaboration with two teachers from the DESS. Now, Professor Stenseth is receiving visiting postgraduates of the DESS.