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Academia Sinica lauds researchers

Sixteen young academics were recognized yesterday for their achievements at a Junior Researcher Award ceremony hosted by Academia Sinica.

Academia Sinica President Wong Chi-huey (翁啟惠) told the ceremony he was very proud of the quality of research conducted by this year's awardees.

“The academics were selected from a pool of 155 applicants in the fields of mathematics and physical sciences, life sciences and humanities and social sciences,” Wong said.

The award is an annual event that was established in 1995 to honor the work of assistant professors, assistant researchers, associate professors and associate researchers.

Yesterday's youngest recipient, 36-year-old Lin Sung-jan (林頌然), an assistant professor at National Taiwan University's biomedical engineering institute, was praised as a “one-in-a-million doctor-scientist.”

He was recognized for his work in cultivating hair follicle dermal papilla cells, a technology that could help millions battling hair loss.

Associate economics professor at NTU Lin Ming-jen (林明仁), who had published an impressive nine papers in internationally renowned journals in seven years after obtaining his doctorate, was awarded for his research titled Can Hepatitis B Mothers Account for the Number of Missing Women? Evidence from Three Million Newborns in Taiwan that was published in the American Economic Review last year.

In its selection statement, Academia Sinica said that Lin Ming-jen's paper “reconciled the debate between two Nobel Prize winners on their theories why the man-woman ratio in Asia is off-balance.”

While Indian-born Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Kumar Sen believes that more baby boys are born in Asia because Asian parents prefer boys over girls, American scientist Baruch Blumberg says the discrepancy came from the fact that hepatitis B is more prevalent in Asia, and hepatitis-B carrier mothers are more likely to give birth to boys.

Lin Ming-jen found that the hepatitis B factor made only a very minor contribution to the gender imbalance in Asia.
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