By Li Han
Staff Writer of the Tsinghua News Center
On October 17 Tsinghua University officially announced the refounding of its Department of Psychology (PSYC) under the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. The opening ceremony was held that morning in the Main Building. It was attended by Tsinghua President Gu Binglin, Honorary Chairman of the Tsinghua University Council Wang Dazhong, Chairman of the Tsinghua Education Foundation He Meiying, and more than 100 experts and scholars in psychology.
World-famous psychologist and a tenured faculty member at the Department of Psychology of the University of California at Berkeley Peng Kaiping becomes the first Dean of the refounded PSYC.
Tsinghua’s Department of Psychology prides itself on the many leading experts it has cultivated in China. It has a long and influential history dating back to 1926. The Department of Educational Psychology was set up in that year. It was renamed the Department of Psychology in 1928. Besides, the Research Institute of Psychology was established in 1932 when graduate students were first enrolled. The Department of Psychology then became one of the six key departments of Tsinghua’s School of Sciences. As part of the nationwide higher education restructuring in 1952, however, Tsinghua University became a polytechnic institution which focused on applied science and engineering. As part of that restructuring, the Department of Psychology was moved to Peking University. In 1979, Tsinghua set up the Research Laboratory for Educational Studies, later renamed the Institute of Educational Research, under which psychology research was conducted. In 2006, the Center for Psychology and Cognitive Science was set up under Tsinghua’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences.
The Tsinghua-Berkeley Center for Psychological Studies was founded in May of 2008 at Tsinghua to strengthen ties and cooperation between the Department and the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. It is an integral part of the overall strategy to rebuild Tsinghua’s Department of Psychology.
(Photo by Guo Haijun)
