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The TAIWAN BRIDGES lecture series officially opened yesterday (November 20) at Academia Sinica. The inaugural talk featured Professor Roger D. Kornberg, recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and Professor of Structural Biology at Stanford University School of Medicine. Delivering a lecture titled “The End of Disease? The Extraordinary Developments in Biomedicine and the Implications for Humanity,” Professor Kornberg presented science-driven solutions to global threats such as pandemics. The event, which drew over 500 participants, featured Professor Kornberg delivering a lecture followed by a lively question and answer session that covered a wide range of topics related to the presentation.

To enhance engagement among Taiwanese and leading global scholars, Academia Sinica has joined forces with National Taiwan University and 12 other academic institutions in collaboration with the International Peace Foundation, to launch the Taiwan Bridges Event Series. Over the next six months, more than 30 Nobel laureates are scheduled to visit Taiwan for a series of talks and academic exchanges.

The opening reception for “From Reflection to Direction: Academia Sinica Architecture and Environment Exhibition” was held on November 6. President James C. Liao noted that, since Academia Sinica relocated to Nangang in 1954, the planning of its campus has been closely tied to shifts in research priorities and societal change. From its modest beginnings on three hectares of farmland to today’s 38-hectare campus, this growth reflects Academia Sinica’s enduring commitment to scholarly advancement and, moreover, Taiwan’s transformation from rural landscapes to a modern metropolis. The major buildings on campus stand as a microcosm of the development of modern architecture in Taiwan. Centered on the themes of “Tracing the Origins” and “Envisioning the Future, ” the exhibition traces the architectural evolution of the campus, pays tribute to the design concepts and academic spirit embodied across different eras, and presents a forward-looking vision for future campus development.<br/>The exhibition is divided into two sections. Exhibition 1 presents early iconic buildings of the Nangang Campus, highlighting the works of postwar architects and engagement with subsequent generations. It illustrates how architecture establishes order and shapes the campus’s spatial character and spirit. Exhibition 2 presents the current development and future plans for the Nangang Campus, the National Biotechnology Research Park, and the South Campus, reflecting contemporary efforts to create a welcoming environment.<br/>Additionally, the future vision of the Academia Sinica campus will be unveiled for the first time in this exhibition. As academic and societal demands continue to evolve, the campus seeks to advance toward a more flexible, sustainable, and friendly research environment. This vision will be pursued in the spirit of “Tracing the Origins, Moving Forward,” reflecting on the past while imagining the future.<br/>The exhibition runs from October 19, 2025 through January 16, 2026, and is open Monday through Saturday from 9:30 AM to 4:30 PM. The public is warmly invited to visit, explore the architectural history of Academia Sinica, and envision its role in leading Taiwan’s intellectual and scholarly innovation.

The Taiwan Precision Medicine Initiative (TPMI), led by Academia Sinica, has established the world’s largest precision medicine research cohort of Han Chinese individuals. By integrating genetic and clinical data, the initiative has developed disease risk prediction methods across multiple conditions, laying a crucial scientific foundation for improving healthcare among more than one billion people of Han Chinese ancestry worldwide.<br/>Academia Sinica President James C. Liao emphasized that “[t]he global foundation of precision medicine has long been based primarily on data from cohorts of European descent. Through TPMI, Taiwan has built a large-scale cohort and database for disease research that reflects the genetic characteristics and their relationship to disease of Han populations. This represents not only a major scientific breakthrough but also a milestone in public health.”<br/>Partnered with 16 healthcare systems and 33 hospitals across Taiwan, the TPMI recruited over 500,000 participants to build the world’s most comprehensive genetic and clinical database for the Han populations. Using this resource, researchers have developed risk predictors for a wide range of diseases, including autoimmune diseases, cancer, cardiovascular disorders and diabetes. <br/>According to Academician Yuan-Tsong Chen, a TPMI scientific advisor, the team recently published two major papers in Nature. The first paper describes the establishment of the 500,000-person cohort and the systematic collection of medical and genetic data; the second demonstrates how large-scale biomedical data analysis can be used to develop disease risk prediction models. These publications highlight Taiwan’s scientific excellence and contributions that garnered international acclaim and opened a new chapter in disease prevention in Asian populations.

Academia Sinica and the Royal Society co-hosted the “UK-Taiwan Bilateral Meeting: Biology for Health, Food and Energy” from October 15 to 17 in London, marking another milestone in strengthening academic collaboration between the United Kingdom and Taiwan.

This year marks the 32nd year of the Pacific Neighborhood Consortium (PNC) Annual Conference and Joint Meetings. Vice President of Academia Sinica and newly appointed PNC Chair, Dr. Shin-Kun Peng, led the Academia Sinica delegation at the PNC 2025 conference, held at the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences (VASS) in Hanoi. From September 20th through the 22nd, the three-day event brought together over one hundred experts and scholars from China, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, South Korea, Taiwan, the United States, the United Kingdom and Vietnam. Academia Sinica Vice President Shin-Kun Peng, along with Han-Ching Wang, Director-General of the National Central Library, presented books to the Institute of Social Sciences Information at VASS, symbolizing the commitment to deepening bilateral academic cooperation and exchange.

A research team led by Academia Sinica <br/>President Dr. James C. Liao, in collaboration with interdisciplinary experts from Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biological Chemistry (IBC), the Agricultural Biotechnology Research Center (ABRC), and the Institute of Plant and Microbial Biology (IPMB), has recently designed an artificial carbon fixation cycle using synthetic biology.

Academia Sinica President James C. Liao has been awarded the title of Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur (Knight of the Legion of Honor) by the French government, in recognition of his outstanding contributions to advancing Taiwan–France academic exchange, strengthening international scientific collaboration, and promoting science as a global public good.

Lung cancer is the deadliest cancer in Taiwan, with over ten thousand deaths annually due to its high incidence and mortality. The Taiwan Cancer Moonshot Project, spearheaded by Academia Sinica in collaboration with the Clinical Proteomic Tumor Analysis Consortium (CPTAC) from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in the United States, has recently completed the first large-scale proteogenomic study of lung adenocarcinoma that encompasses multi-ethnic cohorts from Europe, North America, and Asia.

The 8th Lindau Nobel Meeting in Economic Sciences will take place from August 26 to 30, 2025, in Lindau, Germany. Approximately 20 Nobel Laureates in Economic Sciences and nearly 300 young researchers from 55 countries are expected to participate. Two young economists from Taiwan—Dr. Tsung-Hsien Li, Assistant Research Fellow at the Institute of Economics, Academia Sinica, and Dr. Fei Chi Liang, Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at National Chengchi University—have been invited to attend.

Academician Hsu Cho-yun (1930–2025) passed away on August 3, 2025, in the United States at the venerable age of 95.

Astronomy enthusiasts have been diligently searching for the Solar System’s “Planet Nine.” Is there finally a glimmer of hope? An international project led by Dr. Shiang-Yu Wang and Dr. Ying-Tung Chen from the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Academia Sinica (ASIAA), has discovered a distant Solar System object, 2023 KQ14, nicknamed “Ammonite,” using the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii. Ammonite follows a stable orbit with a perihelion distance of 66 astronomical units (au), placing it in the extremely rare category of “Sedna-like objects” (also known as Sednoids), whose orbits lie far beyond the gravitational influence of Neptune. Notably, Ammonite shows a markedly different orbital orientation from known Sedna-like objects in the Solar System. This surprising contrast sheds light on the complexity and evolutionary history of this distant population, and may reduce the likelihood that Planet Nine exists. The discovery was published on July 14, 2025 in Nature Astronomy.