When Zhong Weichao, a doctoral student at Harbin Institute of Technology in Northeast China's Heilongjiang province, started a yearlong exchange in Israel five months ago, he soon thought you can never judge a country by its size.

"Until I got here, I didn't realize the academic environment would be so dynamic. We have classmates and visiting scholars in our lab who are from Italy, Spain, Romania and so on. It's really an international team," the 27-year-old told China Daily on Wednesday.

Zhong is researching aerospace engineering at Israel Institute of Technology (known as Technion), one of the country's leading technology and scientific research institutes. It has three Nobel laureates on its staff.