RESUME GEORGE T. F. WONG - Academia Sinica

Narrative on a Vision for RCEC
George T.F. Wong
Background
Local setting
The organizational setting of RCEC and the location of Taiwan provide RCEC
with unique opportunities to engage in research in environmental changes at the
cutting edge. The stable long term funding, the technical personnel support structure
and the absence of organizational partitions among the major sub-disciplines (namely,
climate science, marine science and atmospheric science) provide a nurturing
environment for developing excellence and distinguish RCEC from university
departments so that RCEC should endeavor to conduct research that cannot be
carried out readily in the universities. The ready access to diverse sub-environments
with a wide array of environmental conditions from Taiwan offers plentiful
possibilities for testing hypotheses through field observations. These rich
sub-environments can attract international investigators to come to RCEC to conduct
collaborative research. Such advantages can and should be exploited and turned into
tangible dividends. However, as a young organization, RCEC has yet to reach a stable
configuration in its size, in the expertise of its staff and in its supporting
infra-structure. It will have to overcome significant growing pain before it may realize
its full potential. Thus, in its road towards becoming an internationally recognized
research unit, the major challenges in the next few years at RCEC will be:
(1) to add members to the science team so that at least one or two of the
sub-disciplines may move closer towards a critical mass;
(2) to develop research directions that may promote interdisciplinary collaborations
within RCEC and inter-institutional collaborations beyond RCEC and the Academia
Sinica;
(3) to select and place emphasis on research directions that will allow RCEC to
become a player in international research efforts; and
(4) to increase communications and interactions with the international scientific
community to elevate the profile of RCEC in the world.
In order to meet these challenges successfully, there will be the need:
(1) to optimize the application of existing resources and to secure new resources (not
the least of which is the expeditious completion of the RCEC building) to meet the
increasing demands of a growing organization; and
(2) to streamline the supporting infra-structure to accommodate the projected growth.
International setting
A number of white papers have been promulgated in recent years by various
countries and by international agencies, including the widely circulated
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, to call attention to the
urgent need to invest in research on global environmental changes, which likely will
be a major research theme in the next few decades. Two prominent research topics
that have been noted repeatedly are climate change and ocean acidification and some
of the noteworthy characteristics of many of the proposed research programs on
global changes are the need for:
(1) interdisciplinary and national to international collaborations;
(2) couplings among numerical modeling, laboratory simulations and field
observations; and
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