Department of Electrical Engineering Associate Professor Dr. Jri Lee, Institute of Medical Engineering Assistant Professor Dr. Sung-Jan Lin, and Department of Economics Associate Professor Ming-Jen Lin Ascend to Glory by Winning the 2009 Academia Sinica's Young Scholar Research Writing Awards

The Young Scholar Research Writing Award was established by Academia Sinica in 1995. This year's award ceremony was held on June 1st in the Conference Room of the Institute of Information Science of Academia Sinica and officiated by President Dr. Chi-Huey Wong. Academia Sinica received a total of 155 entries for this year's Young Scholar Writing Award, including: 62 entries for the Math and Science Division, 39 entries for the Life Science Division, and 54 entries for the Humanities Division. When the results were announced, there were 16 winners. NTU has three professors ascending to glory by winning this award. They are: Dr. Jri Lee of the Department of Electrical Engineering (Division of Math and Science), Dr. Sung-Jan Lin of the Institute of Medical Engineering (Division of Life Science), and Dr. Ming-Jen Lin of the Dpartment of Economics (Division of Humanities).

The high speed communication chip developed by Professor Jri Lee plays a pivotal role in our daily lives. High tech devices such as high speed computer, fiber optics, and mobile communications have become indispensable aspects of modern living. Dr. Jri Lee published several important theses in the field of integrated circuit design, among which one dwelt upon using 90 nanometers to produce a 20 Gb/s burst-mode clock and data recovery circuit. This is the fastest and most stable circuit of its type in the world today. He used injection locked technology to provide close to 1 Gb/s working bandwidth, which would prove to be very useful in the FTTH (fiber to the home) applications in the future. Another thesis of his focused on the 75 GHz phase lock loop, which was also the fastest single chi phase locked loop in the world today. Dr. Lee's design of the circuitry was unique and innovative, resulting in superb performance of the chip in suppressing phase noise, reference spurs and power consumption. Dr. Lee's design won both the ISSCC Beatrice Winner Award (2007) and the ISSCC Takuo Sugano Award(2008). His scholastic attainment was truly amazing.

Dr. Sung-Jan Lin is a physician/scientist. Since 2003 he has served as an attending physician at NTU Hospital's Dermatology Department. In 2006 he earned his doctoral degree from the Institute of Medical Engineering of NTU, and since 2007 he served as an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Medical Engineering. Specializing in clinical dermatology, Dr. Lin's research interests are two-fold: the first is to apply nonlinear optical imaging to skin research, and the second is to study hair follicle regeneration. In optical engineering, Dr. Lin's research team widely applied multi-photon microscopy to the quantitative detection of skin aging, skin cancer and the structural changes of damaged collagens. In addition, Dr. Lin conducts research on the percutaneous penetration of drugs, one of his papers was on the study of the structural influence of trans-dermal drug enhancers on the cuticles and drug penetration pipelines. That thesis was published in the top journal of dermatology "J Invest Dermatol" and made its cover. On the other hand, he started to study the use of tissue engineering for the regeneration of hair follicles. Hair follicle regeneration is the model for the regeneration of many human organs, and Dr. Lin's research topic included how to control the size, density, direction, color, growth cycle and regeneration efficiency of the hair follicles. He integrated bio-medical materials to develop injectable micro-organizations, and proved that these micro-organizations were conductive to the rebirth of follicles. His research was published in the number one journal of tissue engineering "Biomaterials." The contents of Dr.Lin's past research have great value and potentials for clinical applications.

Dr. Ming-Jen Lin's major research areas are labor and health economics. Within 7 years after his graduation he has published 9 theses, and many of them were published in internationally renowned journals, among which the American Economic Review was one of the four leading journals on the study of economics. The paper which he published in American Economic Review effectively quelled two Nobel laureates' controversy over the cause of sex ratio imbalance in Asoa. Economics scholar Amartya Sen maintains that " gender imbalance in Asia is primarily caused by the concept of valuing men and belittling women which led to the discrimination of the female gender." However, Blumberg, who discovered type B hepatitis argues: "B hepatitis mothers have a higher chance of producing a male child, and this is what caused gender imbalance." Dr. Lin's representative thesis utilized precise Taiwanese data and clever testing techniques to discover that gender imbalance was mainly caused by son preference and the impact of hepatitis B was minimal. Needless to say, Dr.Lin's treatise commanded high attention from international academia, and cast profound influence on social policies, as can be glimpsed from the reportage found in The Wall Street Journal, and the VOX policy website of the European Union. In essence, Dr. Lin distinguished himself by using good data and innovative empirical methods to place a Taiwanese topic on the international stage.