Asia University Establishes a First International Advisory Board

  • 2021-03-13
Taiwan’s Asia University establishes a first International Advisory Board to expand its vision to reach the next level of intellectual excellence.

Higher education has always been an inalienable component of Taiwan’s social, economic and technological successes. The private universities in the land, which now are in the hundreds, are also one of the engines for its success. Being one of the youngest universities in Taiwan, Asia University (AU) in Taichung City, with just two decades of history under its belt, is now ranked as the best among the non-medical private universities.

The founding and current president Dr. Jeffrey J. P. Tsai said that: “As Asia is now one of the most exciting regions of the world, the time has arrived for AU to expand its vision to reach the next level of intellectual excellence.”

Unquestionably, one of the paths to excellence is to allow the university to develop an ambiance of globalization, which must not only be in rhetoric, but in the mindset of everyone in the university, namely faculty, administrators and of course, students.

To reach this end, AU has decided to set up a high level International Advisory Board (IAB), whose members are all down-to-earth educators on the one hand, and on the other have all had significant achievements in shaping Asia’s higher education.

According to Dr. Tsai: “AU is still in its early stage of development. Therefore, how we shape its growth now will surely become its defining culture for the decades to come. To this end, I want to set up an IAB whose members are distinguished global experts in higher education who can provide wisdom and guidance not only to the administrators of AU, but also to all faculty and students as well in a seamless and transparent manner.”

Dr. Tsai then enthusiastically said that: “I am therefore honored and pleased to announce that AU’s inaugural IAB members are Dr. Bertil Andersson, Dr. Alain Bensoussan, Dr. Da Hsuan Feng, Dr. Peretz Lavie and Dr. Eng Chye Tan. Unquestionably, these five individuals who all are world renowned higher educators, and who, with vast experiences leading global positions in higher education in the East and the West, can and will provide the entire AU communities a broad and deep understanding of the fundamental importance of globalization of higher education, in Asia in general and in AU in particular, in the 21st century.”

Dr. Bertil Andersson is a world-renowned biochemist and the former president of two leading institutions of higher learning, Linköping University of Sweden and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Dr. Andersson was also the former Chief Executive of the European Science Foundation in Strasbourg and a member of the Nobel Committee member for Chemistry (and its Chairman in 1997). Until 2010, he was a representative of the Board of Trustees of the Nobel Foundation, He was the Vice President of the Research Advisory Board of the European Commission in Brussels (EURAB). He has also been a Research Advisor to the Swedish Government. Currently he is a Board of Trustees member of KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and the Stockholm Business School. He is also a Board Member of Technion, Israel Institute of Technology.

Dr. Alain Bensoussan is a world-renowned applied mathematician. He is a member of the distinguished French Academy of Sciences, Lars Magnus Ericsson Chair at the University of Texas at Dallas and Chair Professor of Risk and Decision Analysis at City University Hong Kong. He is Emeritus Professor at the University Paris Dauphine. He has been president of INRIA, president of the National Centre for Space Studies (CNES) and chairman of the Council of the European Space Agency. He is a Fellow AMS, IEEE, SIAM.

Dr. Da Hsuan Feng is a world-renowned theoretical physicist and Fellow of the American Physical Society. He was an M. Russell Wehr Professor of Physics and Director of theoretical physics of the US National Science Foundation. Currently the Honorary Dean of the Belt and Road Research Institute of Hainan University and the Chief Advisor of China Silk Road iValley Research Institute. He was formally Vice President of the Fortune 500 Science Applications International Corporation and the University of Texas at Dallas, National Cheng Kung University and National Tsing Hua University.

Dr. Peretz Lavie was the former President of Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. He is a leading expert in the psychophysiology of sleep and sleep disorders, and a former dean of the renowned Rappaport Faculty of Medicine of the Technion. Under his leadership, Dr. Lavie also set up two international campuses: the Cornell-Technion in New York City and Guangdong – Technion Institute of Technology in Shantou, China.

Dr. Eng Chye Tan is the current president of the National University of Singapore (NUS). In the past two decades, NUS has emerged as one of the top universities not only in Asia, but in the world as well. Trained as a mathematician, Dr. Tan has had firsthand knowledge and implementation in the past 15 years with strong administrative skills guiding NUS transformation in the 21st century.

Dr. Tsai concluded that: “The selection of these five outstanding individuals is based on their intellectual strengths, their visions in the 21st century, and by their robust administrative knowledge and skillsets regarding higher education.”

With the AU IAB assistance, stated Dr. Tsai, “we will and can lift AU to the next level of excellence so that it can benefit Taiwan and hopefully the world as well!”

AU in Taichung, Taiwan, was founded in 2001, a visionary, pioneering, dynamic, and fast-growing university. With the mission of educating students in undergraduate and graduate levels appropriate for the world in the 21st century, AU is now ranked as the top non-medical private universities in Taiwan. Today, the university has six colleges, 9,500 and 3,000 undergraduate and graduate students, respectively, and number of 515 outstanding faculty members.