In 2008, the global physics community’s most important body for scholarly exchange, the International Union for Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP), awarded its first Young Scientist Prize in Particle Physics. With hundreds of young scholars from top-tier schools in Europe, the US, and Japan all giving the award their best shot, the prize went to Chen Kai-feng, a young NTU physicist trained right here in Taiwan.

Chen was just 28 at the time, but while his prize was a first for Taiwan, the honor was nothing new to him. After all, he had completed his Master’s degree and PhD at NTU in just four years, and had immediately become an associate professor, skipping over the grueling research-and-teaching assistant-professor stage of the typical academic career.

In 2011 Fermilab Today, the periodical of the US-based Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, published an article entitled “Searching for a Fourth Generation” that praised the excellent work being done by Chen and his research team. The article marked the first time the publication had lauded the work of a non-American research team.

In the summer of 1998, a young Chen, then not yet a sophomore, went knocking on the door of NTU’s high-energy physics laboratory. The lab had previously only admitted graduate students. “No one else had had the ‘gall.’”

Profoundly intrigued by high-energy physics, Chen knew virtually nothing about the field at the time. Fortunately, he was a skilled programmer and made beautiful presentation slides. There was always something for him to help out with in the computer modeling lab and he quickly became indispensible. During his junior year, he began receiving invitations to speak in Japan, which gave him a degree of international exposure.

A severe case of nerves left Chen with shaky hands the first time he had to give a talk entirely in English, but he managed to get through it. While working on his master’s degree, the non-Japanese-speaking Chen marshaled his courage for another trip to Japan, where he joined more than 300 scholars from 13 nations working on the Belle ­experiment at the KEK high-energy physics lab. Chen spent most of that visit either in the lab or the dormitory, managing to get by using his English to communicate with the Japanese academics.

Chen admits that his language skills aren’t very good—he has spent years in Japan and still doesn’t have very good Japanese—but he was an important figure behind the scenes for a multinational team that made important breakthroughs.

In 2003, the Belle project made measurements that offered a glimpse of a new physics beyond the Standard Model, hinting at the existence of another elementary particle in addition to the quarks, leptons and bosons already known to science. Chen played a seminal role in interpreting the measurements. Searching through 150 million decays of B-mesons and their antiparticles, he found decay events that violated the Standard Model. “At that moment, my jaw just dropped,” he recalls.

Bob Hsiung, chair of NTU’s physics department and Chen’s research advisor, says that in Chen’s first year in the PhD program he set him to work studying polarized decay. “It was a very difficult topic,” recalls Hsiung. “I thought it would keep him busy for six months. Instead, he had results in three and was able to publish them.” Hsiung derived tremendous pleasure from having the opportunity to teach someone so brilliant.

Chen Kai-feng, an NTU PhD, is a rising star in the international physics community.

Since obtaining his PhD in 2006, Chen has done post-docs at NTU and the National Science Council, worked at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, and taken part in the Compact Muon Solenoid experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. In 2008, he brought the IUPAP’s Young Scientist Prize to Taiwan.

Though the University of Tokyo wanted very much to hire him as an associate professor, NTU was able to retain him by appealing to his affection for his alma mater.

The model of an outstanding domestically trained scholar, Chen says that his “small” success is the result of his early training in international settings. “High-energy physicists who don’t get training in front-line experimental labs are like soldiers without a battlefield. They can’t get a handle on new discoveries, and have a difficult time responding to programming errors and machine failures.”

Unfortunately, the stipends domestic research institutes provide to PhD students going abroad to do research are too low. For example, the minimum monthly budget considered necessary by the Swiss for living in Geneva is CHF2800 (about NT$81,000), yet the total of the salaries and supplements that Chen and his teammates received while doing research in the pricey city was well below the level that would class local people as “low-income households.”

“High-energy physicists have to travel, because all the cutting-edge research in the field is being done abroad,” says Chen.

With the number of homegrown PhDs increasing, domestic scholars need to be prepared to get out of Taiwan and see a broader swathe of the world in order to develop a solid understanding of the newest research trends and of their personal strengths and weaknesses. As Zhuangzi said, “life has a limit, but knowledge is unbounded.” A PhD doesn’t represent ultimate knowledge; it’s just the beginning of an academic career.

Uptrend in Domestically Trained PhDs (2000-2009)/Source:Dept. of Statistics, Ministry of Education