The National Science Council recently announced the winners of the Wu Ta-You Memorial Award. The award recognizes young researchers and their contributions to the greater academic community. Since its establishment in 1991, NTHU has had a total of 28 young scholars presented with this honor. This year five outstanding young faculty members received this prestigious award—Dr. Tony Shiue-Cheng Tang of the Department of Chemical Engineering, Dr. Julia C. Huang of the Institute of Anthropology, Dr. Chien-Neng Liao of the Department of Material Science and Engineering, Dr. Yi-Chou Tsai of the Department of Chemistry, and Dr. Da-Jeng Yao of the Institute of Nano Engineering and Micro Systems. Out of a total of 35 award recipients, NTHU has the highest per faculty ratio in winning this prize.

Dr. Tony Shiue-Cheng Tang graduated with his Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology. In 2005, he left Singapore's Nanyang Technological University to accept a teaching position at NTHU. Dr. Tang is particularly grateful for NTHU's superior research environment as well as the support and encouragement he has received from fellow faculty members and his department.

Dr. Julia C. Huang is a cultural anthropologist who specializes in the fields of religion, globalization, identity and gender studies. Her research has focused specifically on Chinese religions and their modern developments as well as diaspora Chinese. Her research areas include Taiwan, Vietnam and Chinese diaspora communities in the States, Malaysia and Japan. She wishes to thank the National Science Council's Anthropology Section, Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, NTHU's Research and Development Office, the College of Humanities and Social Sciences as well as the Institute of Anthropology.

Dr. Chien-Neng Liao research focuses on interconnect reliability as well as thermoelectric materials and devices. This is a major breakthrough for interconnect reliability research. The finding was later published in a prestigious international journal, Science in 2008.

Dr. Yi-Chou Tsai has devoted himself to synthesizing highly reactive transition metal complexes and exploring their reactivity toward thermodynamically very stable small molecules. Many interesting reactive complexes have been prepared and characterized by his group over the past few years. Of particular interest is the discovery of the quintuply bonded complexes featuring ultrashort metal–metal quintuple bond lengths, which is a milestone in inorganic chemistry. This remarkable achievement puts Dr. Tsai's group at the top position in this field of studies.

Dr. Da-Jeng Yao's research are in the areas of Bio-MEMS and Microfluidics, including surface modification and detection of bio-medical regents, gas recognition and detection, and multi-electrode array fabrication for neural signal measurement. In addition to publishing more than twenty journal articles and eighty plus conference papers, his research group has been collaborating with international research groups from Germany and Singapore. Based on his research and with the collaborative effort of Stand Toals, they have received 2 US patents and 2 Taiwanese patents. They have also developed the digitalized wrench that will be released by the end of 2009.