1. Introduction and Brief History                                                                                                                                                     Home

Biotechnology has been considered as a star industry in the 21st century. Taiwan is a small island with rather limited resources, it would a wise decision to enhancing the competitiveness of Taiwan biotechnology industry and create more intellectual value. As Taiwan facing with worldwide competition, there is a great demand for high-technology and skilled workers in biotechnology industry. In order to suit such need, the Asia University (called Taichung Healthcare and Management University before August 1, 2005) has established the Department of Biotechnology since 2003 which deliver both undergraduate and graduate programs. To foster the tight co-operation and co-ordination of the education program, the Department of Biotechnology and Biological Sciences merged with Department of Bioinformatics in 2004, and in 2005 the former Department of Biotechnology and Biological Sciences conjoined the Graduate Institute of Bioinformatics and renamed as Department of Biotechnology and Bioinformatics.

2. Education goals and objectives

One of the major education goals of the university is provide Whole-person education. In the last few years, the department has recruited faculty from various backgrounds with the aims to setup the laboratory infrastructure and meet the high quality education and research standard.
The department has established a strong faculty group of biologists, physical sciences and computer scientists, all of whom are dedicated to teaching and research. The curriculum includes the following: biochemistry, physiology, genetics, molecular biology, cell biology, biotechnology, evolution theory, biostatistics, bioinformatics, artificial intelligence, programming language, algorithms, genomics, computational biology, RDBM etc. This curriculum should provide the students an enlightening and stimulating education training. The department’s faculty have tight co-operation with the computer science faculty on biomedical and agriculture research, this co-operation leads to several NSC funded research projects. Results of the joint works have leaded to a number of SCI and international conference publications that could possibly transform or find applications in the biotechnology industry.

In addition to provide professional and experimental training, students are also expected to improve English fluency in reading and writing.

3. Education and research targets

 ¡ provide students a professional education training program,
 ¡  have 130 graduates (110 undergraduate students and 20 MSc. students) every year, and expecting 70 MSc. students (30 students from the part-time bioinformatics program) beginning 2004.
 ¡  have high quality science publications.
　

4. Expected results

According to our five-year mid-term planning, we expect to accomplish the following:
 ¡    become a teaching and research oriented university
 ¡    raise the faculty research capability matching national universities standard
 ¡ attract more talent students
　

5. Evaluation

There are several checkpoints one can set to evaluate the mid-term planning performance:
 ¡     number of SCI/EI publications and patents,
 ¡  academic performance of the undergraduates and number of students admitted in graduate programs,
 ¡  number of granted proposals from the government and private sectors.