The London Times special issue on education, Times Higher Education Supplement (THES), announced its 2009 world university rankings. It is with great pride that NTHU is happy to report our steady improvement in this world university ranking. In 2008, NTHU ranked 281^st, this year we have moved up to 223^rd. From a longer perspective, since NTHU started to receive special funding from the Ministry of Education in 2006 the university's overall performance has been astonishing. In 2006 the university ranked 343^rd which is 111 places below where we stand today.

Among all the international organizations that rank universities worldwide, the Shanghai Jiao Tong University rankings as well as the London Times rankings are generally considered as two of the most important. The London Times survey emphasizes a greater public participation in the evaluation and ranking process. For example, they reported there were 9,386 scholars and 3,281 university administrators participating in the most recent ranking. For this years rankings Taiwan has six universities listed among the top 400, they are; National Taiwan University (95^th), National Tsing-Hua University (223^rd), national Cheng Kung University (281^st), National Yang-Ming University (306^th), National Taipei University of Technology (351^st) and National Chiao Tung University (389^th).

The THES ranking is primarily based on the following criteria: academic peer review (40%), employer review (10%), faculty student ration (20%), citations per faculty (20%), international faculty (5%), as well as international students (5%). In the citations per faculty category, NTHU ranks 133^rd worldwide and 1^st among the 18 Chinese and Taiwanese universities listed in the top 400. This clearly indicates the outstanding academic performance of NTHU's faculty as a group and the fact that we are getting closer to our goal of ascending to a place in the top hundred.

President Wen-Tsuen Chen was very pleased and reiterated, "this ranking reflects the effort we made in pursuing academic excellence." He further indicated, "if we look at the academic qualifications alone, NTHU's ranking actually is at 172^nd worldwide. In addition, our Engineering and Information Technology College would also then be ranked 84^th worldwide. In 2009, among NTHU five research colleges university 4 of them are listed in the top 300. The College of Life and Bio-Medical Science has shown the highest improvement."