Partnership will support Hopkins Engineering doctoral students from Taiwan

A new partnership between Johns Hopkins University's Whiting School of Engineering and Taiwan's Ministry of Education will bring students from that country to the Homewood campus to pursue doctoral studies in engineering beginning in August 2019.

The Taiwan–Whiting School of Engineering/Johns Hopkins University Fellowships program will attract top talent to Hopkins, elevate the university's profile in Taiwan, and also give Taiwanese students access to the wealth of opportunities offered by Johns Hopkins, according to Hedy Alavi, assistant dean for international programs at the Whiting School.

"This initiative will establish an important line of communication to enhance and promote academic and research collaboration and cultural exchanges between the Whiting School of Engineering and its peer institutions in Taiwan," Alavi says. "These students will become our future valuable alumni representing Johns Hopkins University when they return to Taiwan as faculty members/researchers or industry/business leaders."

In order to participate, students must be accepted both by the Whiting School and Taiwan's Department of International and Cross-strait Education, or DICE, which is part of that country's Ministry of Education. Three students will be selected for this scholarship each year.

Prospective students can apply to be supported in all majors and fields of study offered by the Whiting School, with Johns Hopkins and DICE sharing the cost of each fellowship, including tuition and fees, stipends, health insurance, and other expenses. Taiwanese students already studying at JHU are not eligible.

"For both the U.S. and Taiwan, this kind of educational cooperation is important to facilitate the globalization of education and to promote mutual understanding. For Taiwan, the exchange with the U.S. is also very important to further strengthen our educational quality and economic growth," says John Lin of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office's educational division in Washington, D.C., which represents Taiwan's Ministry of Education in the U.S.

The Hopkins-Taiwan fellowship is one of 11 such partnerships between DICE and universities across the world, according to Lin.

"To encourage Taiwan's students to study abroad in top universities, [we] have signed agreements with 10 world famous universities to provide joint financing/naming scholarships to study for doctoral degrees in those universities," he says.

Other universities with similar partnerships include Cambridge and Oxford, Australia National University, University Paris Sud, University of Leuven in Belgium, Columbia University, the California Institute of Technology, the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, the University of Southern California, and Washington University in St. Louis.

"Our goal is to attract the top PhD students from Taiwan to assist our faculty in their research and scientific publications," Alavi says. "We believe that these students who will be accepted across WSE departments will benefit tremendously from the academic resources that will become available to them due to this partnership."