On January 11, the Establishment Ceremony of the Department of Geological and Hydraulic Engineering of the College of Civil Engineering at Tongji University and the Forum on High-Quality Discipline Development were held at the Siping Road Campus. Attendees included Zheng Qinghua, Secretary of the CPC Tongji University Committee and Academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering; Academician Cui Peng of the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences; Academician Yang Shufeng of Zhejiang University; Academician Peng Jianbing of Chang'an University; Academician Dai Shifeng of China University of Mining and Technology (Beijing); Xu Qiang, President of Chengdu University of Technology; Wang Ren, former Deputy Director of the Institute of Rock and Soil Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences; Fan Wen, Vice President of Chang'an University; Academicians Zhu Hehua and Jian Zhimin of Tongji University; and Tongji University Vice Presidents Academician Tong Xiaohua, Zhao Xianzhong, Shi Zhenming, and Xu Xuejun, among other leaders and guests.

Nearly 100 people attended the conference, including leaders and experts from relevant disciplines at more than ten universities and research institutes, such as Tsinghua University, Jilin University, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Central South University, Chengdu University of Technology, Chang'an University, Xinjiang University, China University of Mining and Technology, Hohai University, China University of Geosciences (Beijing), China University of Geosciences (Wuhan), China University of Petroleum, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, as well as alumni representatives, heads of relevant university departments, members of the college's Party and administrative leadership team, and faculty and student representatives.

In his address, Zheng Qinghua stated that, in the face of the opportunities and challenges of the new development stage, discipline development must be rooted in national strategy and activate internal driving forces. It is necessary to closely align with major national engineering and strategic needs and to unleash sustained vitality in serving major national demands. It is necessary to embrace the digital era and inject external momentum, actively introducing new quality productive forces such as artificial intelligence and digital technologies, breaking through the development bottlenecks of traditional engineering disciplines through cross-boundary integration, and promoting discipline upgrading and paradigm innovation. It is necessary to base efforts on the fundamental task of education and cultivate future talent, taking talent cultivation as the core, breaking path dependence and evaluation inertia, and focusing on cultivating outstanding innovative talents capable of defining the future and leading the industry. 

In his address, Xu Qiang said that this move is a forward-looking arrangement by Tongji to serve national strategy and promote interdisciplinary integration, and will inject new momentum into the fields of geology and hydraulic engineering. Alumni representative Wang Duli, a National Engineering Survey and Design Master, fondly recalled his years of study at Tongji and said that the integration of engineering geology and hydraulic engineering is of great significance for solving major national engineering problems.

The College of Civil Engineering presented a discipline development report, systematically reviewing the history of the geological and hydraulic engineering disciplines, which share the same roots and have developed in coordination. In response to national strategies such as "dual carbon" and "deep earth, deep sea, and deep space," the establishment of the new department aims to further integrate advantageous resources and promote the transformation of the disciplines from engineering support to strategic leadership. The new department will focus on tackling key technical challenges in major national projects such as disaster prevention in mega-urban agglomerations and marine engineering, plan for forward-looking fields such as extreme environments and extraterrestrial exploration, and make every effort to advance first-class discipline development through organized research and integrated talent cultivation.

Afterward, the attending guests jointly unveiled the plaque for the "Department of Geological and Hydraulic Engineering."

The subsequent Forum on High-Quality Discipline Development was chaired by Shi Zhenming. The Department of Geological and Hydraulic Engineering presented a report on discipline development and planning. The new department will build a digital-intelligent curriculum chain and a problem-solving-oriented training model, focusing on key directions such as resilient disaster prevention, intelligent underground space exploration, smart water system scheduling, and green marine engineering; deepen Sino-foreign cooperative education and international academic exchange; and advance the modernization of governance systems and cohesive cultural development, striving to build a globally influential first-class discipline system.

During the Forum on High-Quality Discipline Development, participating experts put forward a series of forward-looking and strategic suggestions on the construction direction and development path of the new department. The experts agreed that the new department should closely align with the country's urgent needs in energy security, deep earth development, disaster prevention and mitigation for major projects, and water resource allocation, and should identify its position and demonstrate its value in serving major national strategies. Discipline development must be bold in breaking down traditional barriers, not only achieving deep integration of geology and hydraulic engineering but also proactively pursuing cross-disciplinary collaboration with neighboring disciplines such as civil engineering, surveying and mapping, marine science, and environment, promoting a leap from "institutional merger" to "system reconstruction." In the face of the wave of technological revolution, it should fully embrace artificial intelligence and digital technologies, deeply integrate them into scientific research innovation and the industry-university-research chain, and empower the transformation of traditional engineering disciplines through "digital intelligence." The academicians particularly emphasized that talent cultivation is the foundation of discipline development, and that the knowledge system and curriculum structure must be systematically reformed. Relying on major scientific programs and major engineering practice, efforts should focus on cultivating interdisciplinary leading talents with solid professional foundations, multidisciplinary perspectives, and outstanding innovative capabilities. All participants jointly expect the new department to build a distinctive new discipline paradigm that leads development and to contribute wisdom to solving major engineering science and technology challenges in extremely complex environments and enhancing the country's strategic scientific and technological strength.