NCKU VP to Visit MIT to Initiate Dialogues

NCKU VP to Visit MIT to Initiate Dialogues

(TAINAN, Taiwan, July 22, 2008) –Professor Da Hsuan Feng, senior executive vice president of National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) in Tainan, Taiwan will visit Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston this Friday (July, 25, 2008).

The mission of this visit is to explore the feasibility of academic collaboration and scholarly exchanges between both universities.

Vice President Feng will hold talks with MIT’s Provost, Professor Rafael Reif, , as well as Professor Subra Suresh, Dean of the School of Engineering, Professor Madhu Sudan, Associate Director of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab., Professor Anantha Chandrakasan, Director of Microsystems Technology Lab., Professor Jeffrey Shapiro, Director of Research lab. of Electronics, Dr. Robert Urban, Executive director of Koch Institute for Integrated Cancer Research and Dr. Charles Hsu, Senior Industrial Liaison Officer.

Accompanying Feng will be Professor Shean-Jen Chen, who is NCKU’s Professor of Engineering Science and is currently on sabbatical in MIT and Ms. Liya Hsu, Assistant in NCKU’s Center of Faculty Development.

Dr. Feng announced that NCKU and MIT is co-organizing an international symposium in the coming August. It would be a good opportunity for students of NCKU to contact with their counterparts in MIT via the coming International Symposium on Smart Living Technologies, Cross-Disciplinary Education and Sustainable Culture in Mid-August.

In addition to conducting talks with above mentioned individuals, Professor Feng will also deliver a replica of the lecture notes of one of MIT’s earliest aeronautical engineering alumni (in 1916) and an NCKU professor of mechanical engineering (between 1955-1965) Mr. Wong Tsoo. This notes will become part of the collections of MIT’s archive..

Mr. Wong Tsoo as also had the distinguished honor of being the designer of one of Boeing’s financial lucrative Model C training seaplane and was the company's first Chief Technical Office. Since returning to China after his Boeing bout, Mr. Wong was credited to be one of the most important individuals in developing China’s aerospace industries..

Envisioned and designated by NCKU’s president, Academician Michael M. C. Lai and carried out by Dr. Feng, NCKU is expending its globalization processes, and one of them is to vigorously expose students to diverse cultures. According to Dr. Feng, NCKU is a comprehensive and unique university with obligation and responsibility to nourish the leadership for worldwide.

“We are building our students’ confidence in their own culture and cultivate their deep sensibility to different cultures,” Dr. Feng added.

Introduction of MIT

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological research. MIT was founded by William Barton Rogers in 1861 in response to the increasing industrialization of the United States. MIT's founding philosophy of "learning by doing" made it an early pioneer in the use of laboratory instruction, undergraduate research, and progressive architectural styles. MIT has five schools (Science, Engineering, Architecture and Planning, Management, and Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences) and one college (Whitaker College of Health Sciences and Technology), but no schools of law or medicine. In the 2008 US News and World Report (USNWR) rankings of national universities, MIT's undergraduate program was #7. MIT has more top-ranked graduate programs than any other university in the 2008 USNWR survey and the School of Engineering has been ranked first among graduate and undergraduate programs since the magazine first released the results of its survey in 1988. MIT’s faculty are responsible for lecturing classes, advising both graduate and undergraduate students, and sitting on academic committees, as well as conducting original research. Many faculty members also have founded companies, serve as scientific advisers, or sit on the Board of Directors for corporations. 25 MIT faculty members have won the Nobel Prize. Many of MIT's over 110,000 alumni and alumnae have had considerable success in scientific research, public service, education, and business. Twenty-six MIT alumni have won the Nobel Prize and 37 have been selected as Rhodes Scholars.

About National Cheng Kung University.

With three quarters of a century of distinguished history, with well over 120,000 powerful alumni now dotting the globe, many have achieved supreme successes in arts, business, education, science, technology and healthcare and are ready and willing to assist, with 20,000 academic selective students and 1100 academic significant faculty members currently, both have healthy dosage of international flavor, with enormous regional support, and with a permeating culture of proactive intellectual growth on the world’s stage, NCKU in Tainan, Taiwan, has evolved from its engineering genesis to become a powerful comprehensive, research and international university in Asia Pacific.