Recently, SDAU and the University of Liege in Belgium held the online defense of the joint training program for doctoral students in 2021. After strict evaluation by experts, 5 students were finally admitted into the program.

The University of Liege, founded in 1817, is one of Europe's oldest public universities. It is an internationally renowned comprehensive university with a full range of disciplines as well as first-class academic and scientific research capabilities. In recent years, the University of Liege has carried out in-depth cooperation with the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and other high-level academic institutions in China.

 In June 2018, Prof. Jianbo Xu , the Secretary of the Party Committee of SDAU, led a delegation to visit the University of Liege , and proposed the initiative of the cooperation between the two universities to train doctoral students.After several rounds of discussions, the two universities signed an agreement on the joint doctoral training program in January 2020. According to the agreement, the program lasts for 4 years and adopts the "3+1" training mode, in which the eligible candidates will spend 1 year in the University of Liege to complete the course study and part of the research workand the remaining 3 years at SDAU to complete the main thesis research work. The two universities will assign one supervisor for each eligible candidate respectively. The candidate up to the graduation criteria will be awarded the PhD diploma by the University of Liege.

In 2020, 3 candidates were admitted into this program. Over the past year, the program has been running smoothly and orderly, and it has received great attention and extensive participation from students of different colleges and majors of SDAU.