The lists of the 13^th National Chair Professorship Award and 53^rd Academic Award recipient were announced October 9^th. Professor Chien-Hong Cheng from the Department of Chemistry won the national chair professorship and Professors Meng-Kiat Chuh, Department of Mathematics, Chen-Chi M. Ma, Department of Chemical Engineering and Tsong-Ping Perng, Department of Material Science won the ministry's academic award. NTHU is very proud of them and congratulate them on their achievements.

Professor Chien-Hong Cheng graduated from NTHU with a bachelor's in chemistry before moving on to the University of Rochester to receive his Ph.D. He has previously been awarded the national chair professorship and having been selected again this year means he is now considered as a life long National Chair Professor. He has a long term research interest in metal-catalyzed organic reactions which have become a very powerful new tool for organic synthesis in recent years. He has also successfully discovered several new important transition metal-catalyzed organic reactions including multiple-component and two–component coupling reactions and published more than 150 research papers in this field.

Professor Meng-Kiat Chuah's area of research is quite diversified covering representation theory of Lie groups, symplectic geometry and algebraic combinatorics. In geometry, he applies the method of Chern classes (named after the famous Chinese mathematician S. S. Chern) to investigate some line bundles over symplectic manifolds. This has served as a solid foundation for his later research in representation theory. He also uses symmetry in symplectic geometry to construct unitary representations of Lie groups, known as geometric quantization. He proves the "quantization commutes with reduction" principle, which links symplectic geometry to representation theory. The above symplectic manifolds provide plenty of research topics in complex geometry, and geometric integration problems in complex spaces. In particular, while studying Lie groups, he discovers the subtle applications of combinatronics in the classification of symmetric spaces.

Professor Chen-Chi M. Ma, is a research pioneer in the field of advanced polymer composites, nanocomposite materials, ecology and energy related materials. From his original research results, he has published more than two hundred journal articles and was granted more than seventy Taiwanese, U.S., Japanese, and U.K. patents as well as edited twelve books. The technologies he has developed has been adopted and by several companies for industrial applications.

Professor Perng is currently on leave from NTHU to serve as the president of Yuan Ze University. His research has primarily focused on hydrogen storage and nanostructured materials. On nanostructured materials, he pioneered to prepare organometallic (e.g., Alq3 and Gaq3) nanowires and nanoparticles. It was discovered that both nanowires and film exhibited good and stable field emission properties. He is also the first one to use organic nanowires as the template to prepare oxide nanotubes by atomic layer deposition (ALD). Furthermore, ALD was also employed to form uniform and well dispersed Pt nanoparticles on carbon nanotubes that was used as a catalyst for proton exchange membrane fuel cell and exhibited excellent catalytic activity. The density of catalyst is the lowest ever reported in the literature. Prof. Perng also proposed a novel method, solution-based nanosphere lithography, to synthesize oxide nanohoneycomb structure that could be further used as a nanovessel to prepare metallic nanoparticle array. As for his research on hydrogen storage materials, he has long been studying hydrogen transport in metals and has accumulated a lot of data for investigating hydrogen effects in metals. Recently, he published the first set of hydrogenation pressure-composition isotherms of Ti-6AL-4V (Ti64). Based on that, a very accurate phase diagram of Ti64-H was established. By combining these two results, grain refinement of Ti64 to a nanoscale becomes possible. He also designed and built an automatic Sievert's volumetric system to study hydrogen storage materials. The system has been transferred to many domestic laboratories and industries free of charge.