Miss Nai-chen Chen(left) , a master student at NTU's Institute of Geosciences, discovered the special carbon cycles in the seabed sediments. Her thesis was presented in the 2008 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysics Union and won the Outstanding Student Paper Award.

Miss Chen received notification a couple days ago that her thesis had won The Outstanding Student Paper Award from the American Geophysics Union. This piece of news not only spelled person honor for her, but also glorified NTU as well.

The American Geophysics Union holds its Fall Meeting every year in December in San Francisco, to which thousands of scholars from all over the world regularly attend to present their scholarly findings. The Fall Meeting of the AGU is an important event of the international geophysical community. In order to encourage young scholars to engage in research, the AGU invites several senior researchers to form a panel of judges, who are responsible for reviewing the papers submitted by students from all over the world, and conferring the Best Student Paper Award upon the winners.

Under the tutelage of Professor Tsan Yao Frank Yang (left of the right photo), Miss Nai-Chen Chen recently finished the writing of her master's thesis. She passed her oral in June and earned her Master's degree. Ever since her undergraduate years Miss Chen has participated in the research program supported by the Central Geological Survey of the Ministry of Economic Affairs in regard to the exploration of gas hydrates. The research team to which she belongs, collaborated with the Tokyo University of Japan and the Nanking University of China and discovered the abnormal changes of the isotope composition in the section plane of deep see sediments. By this discovery, the researchers were able to infer that there are active microbial activities in certain depth environments of the sea which cause the abnormal carbon cycles. Such a discovery provides an important clue to the source of the large volumes of methane gas and natural hydrates deposited in the sea waters of Southwestern Taiwan. Under a grant from the National Science Council, Miss Chen participated in AGU's Fall Meeting and presented her research findings, which received tremendous attention and commendation from the panel of judges and allowed her to win the Outstanding Student Paper Award from among hordes of contestants.