The College of Urban and Environmental Sciences (CUES) was established in 1950s. Since then, several generations of geographers have worked hard to highlight the quality of fostering geography talents, enhance the level of constructing subjects and improve the condition of teaching experiments. So far, in order to make geography researches and foster geography talents, the CUES possesses a comprehensive system consisting of four undergraduate programs, seven postgraduate majors, two doctoral programs, and several platforms for subject construction, academic research and experimental teaching. The undergraduate programs include geographical sciences, physical geography, resource, and environment, human geography and urban-rural planning, as well as tourism management. The majors authorized to award master degrees include human geography, physical geography, cartography and geographical information system, regional economics, tourism management, land resources management, and geographical course and education. Human geography, as well as geographical course and education, are authorized to award doctoral degree.
The CUES has about 80 staff, including 16 professors (9 of them are doctoral supervisors) and 16 associate professors. She also employs seven part-time professors from both domestic and foreign universities, including two academicians of Chinese Academy of Sciences. Her teachers are full of life, have doctoral degrees and are most in high technical titles. The current students’ enrollment in CUES is about 800 undergraduates, over 400 postgraduate students and over 30 doctoral students.
The CUES focuses on geography and develops with contact and collaboration of many other disciplines such as economics and management. Her discipline of human geography is one of the key disciplines in Hubei Province. Furthermore, the CUES serves as the representative office in Central China for the Geographical Society of China, the contact office for the Geographical Society of Hubei Province and Wuhan City, and the assigned training center for tourism education in Wuhan. Besides, the CUES hosts a number of research centers and units at ministerial and provincial level, such as: Wuhan Branch of China Tourism Academy, Research Institute of Resource-saving and Environment-friendly Society Construction in Wuhan Metropolitan Area, Research Institute of Geography, Tourism Planning and Landscape Design Research Institute, Research Institute of Sustainable Development, Land Science Research Center, Research Center for Urban and Rural Development and Planning. In recent five years, the CUES has improved her level of academic research by undertaking over 50 national, ministerial and provincial research projects with funds of 40 million yuan and achieving a series of high-level research findings in field of urban geography and regional planning, environmental change and sustainable development, tourism resource development and planning, etc.
In recent years, the CUES has obtained four special laboratory construction projects financed by the Ministry of Finance. With the funds of over 140 million yuan, the CUES has built 16 specialized laboratories, 1 teaching center of Hubei Provincial Demonstration Center of Experimental Teaching in Geographical Sciences, and several experimental centers related to physical geography process, human geography process, geographical information system, spatial analysis and planning and mapping, land use and environmental change, etc. Moreover, the CUES has set up some fieldwork and internship platforms such as Yichang Comprehensive Fieldwork Base, Wuhan Brach of South Survey and so on.
With the integration of excellent research and teaching staff, systematical talents training programs and perfect experimental condition, the CUES has fostered large numbers of graduates with high-quality and comprehensive professional skills, who have enjoyed a good reputation from the society and their employers. Besides, the CUES has provided numbers of qualified master and doctoral degree candidates for lots of remarkable research institutions or universities at home or abroad, such as Chinese Academy of Sciences, Peking University, Beijing Normal University, Nanjing University and Sun Yat-sen University in domestic, as well as well-known universities in the U.S., Germany, the U.K., France, Australia, etc.