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A Visit to Yale on a Rainy Spring Day:
A Day of Meaningful Dialogue with Yale’s Leadership
Da Hsuan Feng
Senior Executive Vice President ,National Cheng Kung University
April 3 of 2009 was a cold and rainy day in New Haven, Connecticut.
Yet' for the National Cheng Kung University delegation representing its President, Academician Michael M. C. Lai, consisting of Da Hsuan Feng, Senior Executive Vice President and Yonhua Tzeng, Vice President for Research and Development, the day was full of exciting and promising discussions with a number of Yale University’s leaders.
Through the meticulous arrangement of NCKU’s good friend, Professor Tso-Ping Ma, who is Raymond John Wean Professor of Electrical Engineering of Yale University, a pioneer of CMOS (a technology which revolutionized the semi-conductor industry) and a member of the National Academy of Engineering, we met the following leaders of Yale University on that day:
- Dr. Peter Salovey, Provost and Chris Argyris Professor of Psychology. Dr. Salovey assumed the Provost position on October 1 of 2008 after his predecessor Dr. Andrew Hamilton assumed the Vice Chancellor (President) of Oxford University. It is worth noting that the predecessor of Dr. Hamilton is Dr. Susan Hockfield, now President of MIT. Interesting to also note that the current Vice Chancellor (President) of Cambridge University, Dr. Alison Richard, was also former Provost of Yale and the current President of Duke University, Dr. Richard Broadhead, was former Dean of Yale College, a position which was held by Dr. Salovey, prior to becoming Provost. These individuals, which are now leaders of some of the world’s most outstanding universities, had all served under Yale’s current President Richard Levin. Surely this must say something about President Levin!
- Dr. Bruce F. Carmichael, Deputy Dean, School of Engineering and Applied Science. Trained as an architect, Dr. Carmichael was former Associate Provost of Science and Technology.
- Dr. Paul A. Fleury, Frederick William Benecke Professor of Engineering and Applied Science. Dr. Fleury, a member of the National Academy of Science and National Academy of Engineering, was the former Dean of Engineering and Applied Science. Dr. Fleury was the first Director of the Yale Institute for Nanoscience and Quantum Engineering (Yinqe), “…a program launched in October 2006 to build on existing research strengths in Yale sciences and engineering, and to broaden the interdisciplinary activity among faculty and students across the university.”
- Mr. Donald L. Filer, Associate Secretary and Director of Office of International Affairs.
- Ms. Fawn Wang, Assistant Secretary of the University.
Discussions with such an outstanding and eclectic group of leaders of one of the global leading universities were wide ranging and as in depth as possible within the time constraint.
Discussion with the leadership of the School of Engineering and Applied Science
 From left to right:
VPRD Yonhua Tzeng, NCKU; Prof. Tso-Ping Ma, Yale Univ.; Prof. Paul A. Fleury, Yale, Univ.; SEVP Da Hsuan Feng, NCKU. First, Yonhua and I explored with Drs. Ma, Carmichael and Fleury about possible collaborations between Yale and NCKU. Naturally our discussions centered on scientific and technological disciplines. We all agreed that whatever collaborations we intend to engage in, they must be intellectually worthy and operationally sustainable. Furthermore, I mentioned that NCKU’s leadership team fully subscribes to the theme that permeates in all the memorable speeches of Yale’s President Richard Levin, and that is research universities of the 21st century must shoulder the responsibilities of rendering the world a better place for humanity. To this end, any collaboration or collaborations we might engage in must in some way fulfill this mission.
It is interesting that NCKU and Yale University has at least one common feature, and that is their respective medical schools are located in the same campus, in fact within short walking distances, with the rest of the university. Such proximity between the medical schools (and teaching hospitals) and science, engineering, social science and humanity colleges do present tremendous opportunities for multidisciplinary and disparate areas, such as medical devices and public policies. For example, both universities are now engaging in active research in life-science “imaging” research. Such research requires close collaborations between people with medical and engineering expertise. Furthermore, as Paul Fleury emphasized, the collaboration must be initiated at the level of people of vastly different disciplines “asking questions” together initially, not one group asking the question and the other group looking for solutions.
In addition, both sides agreed that “to test the water,” we need initiate something modest in scope but not necessarily too narrowly focused so that if the initial collaboration proves to be successful, it can be “scaled up” to disparate disciplines.
We also extended a warm welcome to the School of Engineering and Applied Science to send a delegation to visit NCKU.
To this end and with the above mentioned preamble, both sides agreed that we will work on identifying a finite number of disciplines, say no more than 3 to 4, as possible initial areas of collaboration.
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