Barry Sanders – director of the Institute for Quantum Science and Technology at the University of Calgary, Canada – last week visited the headquarters of IOP Publishing, which publishes Physics World.

Sanders has just taken over from Eberhard Bodenschatz as editor-in-chief of New Journal of Physics, and it’s a coup to have him in the role, not least because he’s an incredibly busy physicist, making – by his reckoning – at least 150 international flights a year.

Many of his travels take him to China, where Sanders has close ties with other top quantum-information scientists, particularly those at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei. In fact, he works closely with the university’s Jian-Wei Pan and Chaoyang Lu, who won the 2015 Physics World Breakthrough of the Year award for teleporting two quantum states at the same time.

Watch my interview above with Sanders to find out more about how he got involved with China, what it’s like collaborating with scientists there and the culture of science in the country. Sanders also touches on China’s Thousand Talents programme to bring top researchers to the country and explains why he’s not too worried about the recent blip in the country’s economy.

• Physics World published a free-to-read special report on China in 2011 and will be publishing another next September