On April 1st, 2013, National Tsing Hua University warmly welcomed the Rector of one of Israel’s top research universities, Professor Zvi HaCohen from Ben Gurion University of the Negev. This university with 20,000 students and 800 faculty member is named after David Ben Gurion, the first Prime Minister of the State of Israel. Except that BGU has a medical school, the similarity between BGU and NTHU is eerie!
A world renowned biotechnologist, Professor HaCohen main mission to National Tsing Hua University is to establish the content for an MoU between the two universities. As Professor HaCohen said very clearly, this is also the basic principle of NTHU, that MoU is merely a platform for collaboration. Since any world class university research faculty members do research based on “intellectual curiosity,” any real and sustainable collaboration will and must be “bottom up” and not “top down.” With that in mind, we outlined some possible areas of research collaboration.
First, as research universities of the 21st century, both BGU and NTHU must shoulder the responsibility of mitigating the global challenges. As we all agreed that “energy” is a fundamental challenge, and that is an area where both NTHU and BGU are very strong in, we decided to list that as one of the areas we will explore collaboration. An action item could be to organize a joint BGU-NTHU workshop on energy per se soon.
Second, we agreed that perhaps another major and imminent global challenge is the shortage of water. To this end, since desalination research is strong in both NTHU and BGU, we will find colleagues from both universities to work together. Professor Zvi HaCohen will identify for us the research individual in BGU in this area. On NTHU side, Professor Fan-Gang Tseng, who is our Associate Vice President for Global Affairs and a Professor in System Science and also an expert in water desalination research, will serve as NTHU’s window in this effort.
Third, it is agreed that we should look into how social sciences and humanities as well as management collaboration could be initiated. Dean of NTHU Commission for General Education Hsiao-Chin Hsien could serve as our window of communication. Professor HaCohen will identify someone from BGU side for this collaboration.
All in all, this visit was indeed fruitful. Exchange of MoU template has already begun!
Da Hsuan Feng
Senior Vice President, Global Strategy, Planning and Evaluation
National Tsing Hua University
a member of the University System of Taiwan
資深副校長 馮達旋 教授
(全球策略與企劃研考)
國立清華大學
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