Academia Sinica

Academia Sinica (AS, ; ), headquartered in Nangang, Taipei, is the national academy of the Republic of China (Taiwan). Founded in Nanking, the academy supports research activities in a wide variety of disciplines, ranging from mathematical and physical sciences, to life sciences, and to humanities and social sciences. As an educational institute, it provides PhD training and scholarship through its English-language Taiwan International Graduate Program in biology, agriculture, chemistry, physics, informatics, and earth and environmental sciences. Academia Sinica is ranked 144th in Nature Publishing Index - 2014 Global Top 200 and 18th in Reuters World's Most Innovative Research Institutions of 2019. The current president since 2016 is James C. Liao, an expert in metabolic engineering, systems biology and synthetic biology. History Academia Sinica, which means "Chinese Academy", was founded in 1928 in Nanking, then capital of the Republic of China, with its first meeting held in Shanghai. By December 1948, all fourteen institutes of the Academia Sinica had agreed to move from Nanking to Taiwan alongside other institutions of the government of the Republic of China as a result of the Chinese Civil War. In the end, only the Academia Sinica's Institute of History and Philology was relocated to Taiwan, because the head of the Institute of Mathematics, Jiang Lifu, resigned his position in June 1949, and never traveled to Taiwan.