Some of China’s deepest questions about mining are studied at Anhui University of Science and Technology, home of two state key laboratories for deep coal mining and for the digital, unmanned extraction of coal. The university in Huainan is one of the first two institutions in the country to train coal-mining undergraduates, and its newest campus reflects how far the field has come: the school now also runs a fusion-engineering college.
The lineage runs through one of China’s great engineering universities. Founded in 1945 as an industrial vocational school, the institution was elevated to the Hefei Mining Institute in 1955 and renamed Hefei University of Technology in 1958. In 1971 its entire mining department moved to Huainan to form a new coal college, a second founding that led, through several names, to the present Anhui University of Science and Technology in 2002. A new Hefei campus opened in 2024, bringing the two branches of the old school back to the same city.
Its safety-science discipline earned a top-A rating in the latest national discipline assessment, the first for any Anhui provincial university, and the school entered the province’s double first-class development program in 2025. Nine doctoral authorization points, 67 undergraduate programs and six disciplines in the ESI global top 1 percent serve a student body of more than 40,000.
Research climbs from the deep to the distant: a national major science and technology program for deep-earth exploration, led by the university in 2025, and a second-class national science and technology progress award, the only provincial university in Anhui to lead such a project. Two state key laboratories and 52 provincial-and-ministerial platforms support the work, while the fusion-engineering college and a carbon-neutrality college open a line from today’s coal to tomorrow’s energy.
More than 350,000 graduates include five academicians of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. The university employs one full-time academician among its 5,000 faculty and medical staff, and its graduates lead Anhui universities in employment placement, with one in three going on to graduate study.
Digging deep and thinking far are, for Anhui University of Science and Technology, the same job, proven over eighty years in which a mining department that moved once became a university that moves with the times.
Data Source: AUST Official Website (as of 2026)
