Achievements and Highlights in 2021
This project assisted Taipei Medical University in innovating teaching, developing its unique features, increasing its publicness, fulfilling social responsibilities, and promoting international research efforts in key fields. The project’s achievements in 2021 are as follows:
- (1) The university ranked the first in Global Views Monthly’s 2021 University Ranking for private universities and for medical universities, which was the fourth year in a row. (2) Interdisciplinary education was promoted. The proportion of students taking interdisciplinary courses increased to 24.6% in the first semester, 110 Academic year (from 5.1% in the 106Academic year). (3) Innovation and entrepreneurship education was refined. Students from the university had excellent performance in various entrepreneurship competitions, including winning the Award of Excellence in the Ministry of Education’s U-Start competition and first place in the 2021 Zhanguoce National Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition. (4) Prompting program design course, 96% of undergraduate students took the course. (5) Ninety-one classes were recorded and uploaded to MOOCs, with a total of over 230,000 views; 29 of the classes were taught in English.
- (1) The university, with its continuous devotion to translational medicine, expended its research efforts to a new research area, namely precision health, on top of its four expertise areas (i.e., cancer translation, medical neuroscience, pulmonology, and medical artificial intelligence), two emerging areas (i.e., cell therapy/immunotherapy and the research and development of biomedical devices), and two potential areas (i.e., heart as well as urology and kidney). The new research effort was led by top scholars with a fellow rank along with their basic research and clinical research teams. (2)The university published 2,194 papers in SCI journals, with an average impact factor (IF) of 5.20; 727 of these papers were published in a journal with an IF greater than and equal to 5 and less than 10, and 101 of these papers were published in a journal with an IF greater than 10. In 2020, the university published 874 papers in journals with an IF greater than or equal to 5, which accounted for 39% of all its published paper that year, and 35.8% were completed through international coauthorship (up until November 3, 2021). (3)The university received grants for various large-scale research projects, including Establishing A Translational Female Cancer Biomedical Big Data Bank and Developing Precision Medicine Healthcare System (4-year project, NT$96 million), The applications of “Precision Health for Women” big data in novel diagnostic algorithms and tests for breast cancer and female infertility (4-year project, NT$32 million), Characterization of TEAD4 as a master regulator of mitochondrial activities and a potential oncogene for prostate cancer (5-year project, NT$32.5 million), Ministry of Health and Welfare Phase III Cancer Research Program, and Promote the Clinical Trial Development Project. (4)The university achieved fruitful results in industry–academic collaboration programs; it earned NT$189 million from industry–academia collaboration programs and NT$160 million from royalty payments for technology transfer in 2021; and founded 4 new affiliated startups in 2021, with the total number amounting to 22, and one startup has been trading its stocks in Taiwan’s Emerging Stock Market.
- publicness: (1) For financially disadvantaged students, the tuition and fees were reduced or exempted, and scholarships exclusive to low-income students were offered. On average, students who were eligible received NT$110,000; applications of such exclusive scholarships from 2019–2021 were all granted. (2) The admission requirements preferential for financially disadvantaged students were loosened, and an additional admission program was established exclusively to financially disadvantaged students. In the 2021–2022 academic year, 14 departments participated in this new admission program and provided a total availability of 20 admissions through this program.
- (1) The university ranked the first in the 2021 CommonWealth Magazine’s University Social Responsibility and University Citizenship Survey for private universities. (2) The university won the Gold Award for Sustainability Reporting, Silver Award for Sustainability Action, and Talent Development Leadership Award granted by Taiwan Institute for Sustainable Energy.
- (1)With a focus on translational medicine, the university published 29 high-quality papers (IF ≥ 10) in the fields of cancer translation, medical neuroscience, pulmonology, and medical artificial intelligence in 2021. Two of these papers authored by Chiang Chen-yuan, a medical doctor and faculty member of the university, were published in Lancet (IF = 79.321). (2) With a focus on the aforementioned key research fields, the university enhanced its international outreach by recruiting 19 international faculty members; 44% of the PhD student body were international students. (3) The university established common research funds with prestigious universities worldwide (e.g., Case Western Reserve University and the University of Lille) to promote international collaboration in research. (4) In 2021, the university founded three affiliated startups in the key fields, namely Empower Biomedical Technology (medical neuroscience), Smart Surgery (medical artificial intelligence), and T-JET Meds (medical artificial intelligence).