Geared up to celebrate its 100th Anniversary Celebration in a few short months, National Pingtung University of Science and Technology (NPUST) was just named winner of the 2024 CommonWealth Magazine University Citizen Award, distinguishing itself as the champion among all public technical and vocational schools in the country in the area of USR. At the award ceremony, which was held on September 18th, NPUST President Chin-Lung Chang and Center of Interdisciplinary Feature Development Director Hsu-Yang Kung accepted the award on behalf of the school.

The NPUST Forestry Department cooperated with the Daren Forest Farm and local businesses to hold a workshop during the summer holidays, running from August 21st to 23rd. The three-day and two-night training camp was designed with vocational high school students and teachers in mind. More than 30 teachers and students from 9 vocational high schools, 10 regular high schools, and non-school-affiliated experimental education groups from around Taiwan participated in the event.

The “2024 Smart-Tech Low-Carbon Agriculture and Sustainable Management Workshop” organized by the NPUST Program of Artificial Intelligence and Mechatronics was held on August 12th, attracting 20 elite Overseas Chinese students from such countries as Australia, Canada, the United States, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines. The turnout demonstrates the important role NPUST is playing with respect to the promotion of Taiwan’s New Southbound Policy.

Associate Professor Mohsen Gavahian of the NPUST Department of Food Science is dedicated to research in the field of novel food processing methods, and his work is having an impact. This is evidenced by the fact that each year, for the last four years, Gavahian’s name has been found on the prestigious Stanford-Elsevier Ranking of Top 2% Top-cited Researchers—a list which selects the top 2% of scholars from a pool of 8.5 million researchers globally. He was also awarded the International Union of Food Science and Technology (IUFoST, International) Award in 2022. Adding to these achievements, this year (2024) his excellent R&D and teaching capabilities have earned him the Youth Sustainability Leadership Award, which was presented to him on August 8th at the Taipei World Trade Center.

NPUST and the National Science Council (NSC) are working together to promote popular science. In order to make preparations for the “2024 Taiwan Science Popularization Train”, Professor Hudson Hsu and Professor Chang-Hsien Tai of NPUST, and Director General Yeh Chih-cheng and Section Chief Tai-Ju Tseng of the NSC Department of International Cooperation and Science Education called a meeting with several interested parties, including Dr. Tsung-Wei Chang of NCKU and DGE Alfred Lin of Rotary International District 3510. Together, they paid a visit to Director Ing-Shane Yang of the Pingtung County Education Department, and Section Chief Pei-shan Wu of the Teaching Development Section to discuss the project.

This summer (2024), NPUST cooperated with the Tainan Branch of the Agency of Rural Development and Soil and Water Conservation (MOA) to conduct a soil and water conservation and improvement project at Jingsi Lake on the NPUST campus. On July 11, over 30 teachers and students from the Department of Aquaculture and the Institute of Wildlife Conservation worked together to capture the wildlife living in the lake so that a dredging project could be carried out. Both native and non-native species were removed from the area for safe keeping until the dredging was completed. The team then successfully returned the native species they had captured to the lake. For the species which were not native to the area, a new habitat was also provided.