Reserach Express@NCKU

A new page of higher education in Taiwan has been opened up. The first two students qualified for the Dual-Degree International Study Program left for Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) this August. President Lai especially arranged a meeting with them. He cared very much about their accommodations, life and study plans in the US and encouraged them to participate in class more actively and set up a good example for the school fellows. He expected their example would be great encouragement for those who also wanted to study abroad in the future. To help them finish their degrees, NCKU offered each of them a scholarship of 650 thousand NTD.

The Dual-Degree International Study Program was established with Case Western Reserve University at the end of last year in order to build a boundary-free world of knowledge. Students from the two schools, if qualified, may go to the other school but receive two degrees at the same time. The program not only makes it easy for students of the two schools to study abroad, but would cultivate more students with the multi-cultural background. This kind of program is unprecedented in Taiwan. According to the regulations of the program, students qualified for it will receive the degrees from the two schools after they have completed the required credits. Which means an undergraduate student from can go and finish his school courses at Case Western Reserve University, and vice versa. CWRU is an internationally renowned research university at the Lake Erie, Ohio. It is ranked 50 in the world university ranking. There have been 20 Nobel Prize Laureates from the school, including Albert A. Michelson (1970), the first American winner who invented the interferometer which could accurately measure the light speed, and also proved the “etherless”. The experiment design is still actively applied for the precision optical screening. The recent winners include Polykarp Kuschm and Donald A. Glaser in Atomic Physics, Paul Berg in Gene Engineering, Alfred Gilman in Cell Signaling, and Freid Murad in Nitric Oxide signaling. The last two have contributed very much to the development of medicine.

CWRU comprises 9 colleges, including the College of Arts and Sciences, School of Dental Medicine, Case School of Engineering, School of Law, Weatherhead School of Management, School of Medicine, Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing, Mandel Center for Non-Profit Organizations, and Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences. CWRU is the first school that constructed optical fiber network that covered the entire school in the world. According to the latest statistics, Weatherhead School of Management is ranked 25th in the world; the Department of Biomedical Engineering is ranked among the top 4 in the US and the funding from the NIH is also among the top 4. The Department of Nursing, the Department of Library and Information Science and the Department of Operations used to be ranked number one in America. Every college of the school has excellent performance. In recent years, its Departments of Materials Science, Department of Macromolecular and Accounting are also very outstanding. Its School of Medicine has always been among the top 20 in America. The Department of Biomedical Engineering that integrated the already renowned Case School of Engineering and School of Medicine was once ranked top 3 in America. It is also one of the key graduate schools for CWRU. The students of CWRU are also the elite of American students, according to the SAT scores posted in the US News and World Reports. As a research university, CWRU works closely with the industry. There is an incubation center in the school to promote mutual collaboration projects for the school teachers. Their collaborative institutes include National Institutes of Health, the AMES under NASA. The latter one has carried out many projects with the Department of Materials and the Department of Engineering of CWRU. Moreover, the Department of Macromolecular Science and Engineering, because of its collaboration with Bridge Stone and BP, was once ranked on the very top in the US. Last but not least, many outstanding professors at CWRU are often recruited by some prestigious schools such as Harvard and Princeton University.