Prof Da Hsuan Feng receives the 2016 Kwoh-Ting Li Memorial Medal Award
Prof Da Hsuan Feng, director of global affairs and special advisor to rector at the University of Macau (UM), on 28 May received the 2016 Kwoh-Ting Li Memorial Medal Award for his contributions to education in the Asia-Pacific region. The award was presented to Prof Feng by Dr Raymond T Yeh, a co-founder of the Society for Design and Process Science, who is also a world renowned computer scientist and entrepreneur. ‘I am deeply honoured by this recognition,’ says Prof Feng. ‘There is no doubt in my mind that Taiwan’s economic miracle and subsequent affluence, which helped to enhance people’s quality of life, were largely due to the courageous public policies instituted by several individuals. Kwoh-Ting Li was the most notable of them.’ Prof Feng has accumulated three decades of academic and corporate experience in the United States, where he built a broad and strong global network. He was M Russell Wehr Chair Professor of Physics at Drexel University in Philadelphia, director of the Division of Theoretical Physics of the United States National Science Foundation, vice president of the University of Texas at Dallas, and vice president of the Fortune 500 Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). In the past nine years in Asia, besides his job at UM, Prof Feng has also served as a senior vice president of two top universities in Taiwan, namely Cheng Kung University and Tsing Hua University, where he was deeply involved in creating a dialogue for university autonomy. In addition, Prof Feng put a lot of effort in promoting intellectual collaborations between Taiwan and mainland China, most notably the collaboration between Tsinghua University in Beijing and Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, and the exchange of Minnan culture between the southern part of Taiwan and Xiamen city in mainland China. He also proactively engaged with academic institutions in India and Europe, and has lectured at nearly all corners of Asia Pacific and South Asia. The Kwoh-Ting Li (KTL) Memorial Medal Award was established in 2012 as a special honour to the speakers of KTL Memorial lecture at international conferences of the Academy of Transdisciplinary Learning and Advanced Studies. This year’s conference was held in Xi’an Jiaotong – Liverpool University in Suzhou, mainland China.