NTU President Pan-Chyr Yang flew to Kuala Lumpur in June to represent NTU at the Association of Pacific Rim Universities Presidential Retreat and 20th Annual Presidents Meeting, which was hosted by the University of Malaya from June 26-28.

The president was accompanied by Vice President for International Affairs Luisa Shu-Ying Chang and Office of International Affairs Manager Cher Chiu at the event.  President Yang played a significant role at this year’s meeting as he was invited to present a report on “The APRU Vision” during the Presidents Meeting.  He was also elected to the APRU Steering Committee, becoming the first NTU president to sit on the ten-member task force.

The APRU, which currently has 45 member universities, was established in 1997 to facilitate dialogue and cooperation among the premier research universities in the Asia-Pacific region.  This year’s presidents meeting attracted approximately 110 participants, including international affairs officials and administrators representing member universities and 20 university presidents.

In his report, President Yang described the close cooperation and contact NTU currently enjoys and continues to expand with other APRU members.  He first noted that, over the 14 years since the founding of the APRU in 2002, NTU has organized and participated in numerous symposiums on such topics as climate change, the environment and energy, public health, university library museums, and women’s leadership.

This year, NTU has joined the University of Oregon and University of New South Wales in forming a core team focused on sustainable urban and landscape architecture development, which will serve as an extension of NTU’s existing cooperation with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  President Yang also highlighted the three-university joint Master’s program established by NTU, the University of Tsukuba, and University of Bordeaux, which drew great interest and inquiries from the audience.

President Yang’s election to the Steering Committee came as the result of a year of dedicated effort by the Office of International Affairs.  Yang’s two-year term on the committee runs until 2018.  It will be in that year, which is the year NTU celebrates its 90th Anniversary, that President Yang and NTU will have the honor of hosting the APRU Annual Presidents Meeting.