By Ban Zhuo
Special to the Tsinghua News Center
Professor Nieh Hua-Tung, director of the Center for Advanced Study
No wallpaper, no potted plants, not even a hanging painting—just four bare walls and a blackboard. There’s nothing in Professor Nieh Hua-Tung’s office to remind visitors that this is home base for the Director of the Center for Advanced Study in Tsinghua, an institute that boasts a Nobel laureate and a number of top Chinese scientists.
The rooms next to Professor Nieh’s office are for professors and researchers in the center. Their rooms all overlook an indoor courtyard where students and researchers are seen sitting at round tables, holding small discussions.
“I daresay it’s a really neat place for research,” Professor Nieh said, as he showed visitors around the two-story building.
Professor Nieh has been the Director of the Center for Advanced Study in Tsinghua since its founding on June 2, 1997. “I was not very sure about it several years ago, but now I’m confident the Center is going to grow with a good and healthy momentum,” he said, as he commented on the history and future development of the eight-year-old center.
The idea of setting up an advanced study center in Tsinghua was first raised in the early 1990’s, when several senior faculty members from the mathematics and physics departments of the university put forward a proposal for a theoretical sciences research unit. Their proposal was not materialized until the mid-90’s, however, when Professor Wang Dazhong, then President of Tsinghua University, initiated organization for a center modeled after Princeton’s famous Institute for Advanced Study.
In June 1997, the center was officially launched, with Nobel laureate Professor Chen Ning Yang as its honorary director, and Professor Nieh as the full-time director.
“China needs a basic science research institution that can provide quality academic exchanges,” Professor Yang said. He was at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study for 17 years starting from 1949, which he considered to be his most academically fruitful period.
It was not until March 1998 that a Center for Advanced Study Foundation was established in Hong Kong. It has been supplementing the Tsinghua Center’s operating costs and payrolls for professors and researchers, according to Professor Nieh. So far, the foundation has raised about $10 million, most of which came from US and HK donors.
“At the end of the day, the size of this center will depend on the size of the foundation,” Professor Nieh said. “Each year we plan to spend less than five percent of the principal, which, at present, puts the limit to the number of permanent professors at about ten.”
Professor Yang said that the limited size may actually be an advantage for the research center, pointing out that most successful advanced study centers in the world are small and compact.
The center now has five permanent professors, and according to Professor Nieh, a major job for Professor Yang and himself is to search for qualified candidates whose credentials can match the center’s academic caliber.
“We are looking for scholars who are young, talented, and above all, passionate for science,” Professor Nieh said.
The newcomers must prove themselves worthy of their peers, who include: Professor Chen Ning Yang, Nobel Prize winner in physics (1957); Professor Andrew Chi-Chih Yao, recipient of the A. M. Turing Award (2000); Professor Wang Xiaoyun, who is widely known for having successfully decoded two international cipher systems in 2005; and others.
Most of the newcomers will primarily be working as researchers, with appointments revised every three years.
“We don’t have detailed research timetables for researchers in the center. They have complete freedom to conduct whatever research that interests them,” Professor Nieh said. “But at the same time, the researchers are under immense pressure to prove their academic abilities in three years, or they will have to go at the end of the term.”
No researcher has stayed in the center for more than two terms so far, “which is common in many good research institutions in the world,” Professor Nieh explained.
Besides permanent professors and researchers, he said, the center now has seven – soon to be eight -- Changjiang Professors. The Changjiang Scholarship is an award granted by China’s Department of Education to acknowledge outstanding contributions made by Chinese scholars.
The center is also frequented by world-class scientists, whose visits and seminars fill up the center’s calendar. About 30 visiting scholars are visiting the center this year, staying from a week to a year.
“In terms of academic exchanges, this center is doing way better than research institutions in many American universities,” Professor Nieh said.
The Center for Advanced Study in Tsinghua was modeled after the one in Princeton in the US. But unlike its American counterpart, Tsinghua’s center has the advantage of being both a research institution and a place of learning, according to Professor Nieh.
The center now enrolls 24 doctoral candidates and seven post-doc students.
“One of our advantages over Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study,” he said, “is that professors and researches here have the opportunity to have direct contact with undergraduate students in Tsinghua, who have potential to be very good post-graduates.”
Professors and researchers in the center are encouraged, although not required, to teach undergraduate or graduate courses, which are open to all science majors in Tsinghua. Last year, for example, Professor Chen Ning Yang taught a freshman physics course for one semester.
“From my own experience,” Professor Nieh said, “teaching helps the researchers to improve their own understanding of what they teach.”
Professor Nieh refrained from talking too much about the long-term plans of the center—all is not set yet: the center’s size, number of the researchers, academic achievement goals, and the time that one of the researchers may get a Nobel Prize…
“You don’t set goals like that for basic science research,” he said. “It just doesn’t work that way.”
“And,” he continued, “a Nobel will come when it comes.”
Zhang Yanyan and Li Ke contributed to this story.
