Research at Universities in Asia: Trends in 2013

Universities in Asia are undoubtedly developing a stronger global presence, but what kind of academic research is the region producing? Martin Ince investigates.

The QS University Rankings: Asia has now appeared five times, and has become established as the definitive account of academic excellence in the world’s most populous continent.

A glance at the top of the 2013 rankings reveals one obvious fact. Four of the top 10 universities in Asia have some combination of the terms “science” or “technology” in their title, including the first-ranked Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST).

This suggests a strong awareness in the region of the importance of new scientific and technological knowledge, which we reflect in the rankings by our measures of research paper outputs and citations.

But how good are universities in Asia at producing science and technology breakthroughs? One quick way of finding out, at least in the science arena, is to look at recent awards of Nobel Prizes in chemistry, physics and biomedicine (formally called physiology or medicine).

Nobel Prize winners in Asia

A quick look suggests Asian nations are right to fear their best scientists are leaving home to maximize their careers. One of many examples is Osamu Shimomura, who with collaborators won the 2008 Nobel Prize for chemistry. Shimomura was born in Kyoto but working in the US at Boston University. Meanwhile Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, joint Nobel Prize winner in 2009, was born in India but is now based in Cambridge, UK.

However, the globalized structure of modern science means it is not necessary for the top talent to leave Asia to work with the best scientists around the world. The 2010 chemistry prize was won by Ei-ichi Negishi, born in China and working at Purdue University in the US, along with Akira Suzuki, born in Japan and still working there, plus Richard Heck of the US. Their work on catalyzing chemical reactions will allow drugs and other complex chemical compounds to be synthesized more readily and possibly with lower energy inputs.

Nobel Prizes have such prestige that Asian nations such as Japan and China have set targets for the number they wish to win. And there has been some success. The 2009 physics prize was won by a group including Charles Kao, born in Shanghai and working jointly between the Chinese University of Hong Kong and STL, a British company. His work could hardly be more topical. It describes the performance of fiber optics, which are now replacing metal wires as the backbone of the world’s telecommunications systems.

Also in physics, the 2008 prize was won by three Japanese scientists. Yochiro Nambu had by then moved to Chicago, but Matao Kobayashi was based at the University of Tsukuba and Toshihide Maskawa at Kyoto University. Their work was rather less applied than Kao’s, and has to do with possible existence of new categories of sub-atomic particle.

Emphasis on applied research

Indeed, it seems Japan is unique in Asia for supporting highly theoretical research on a large scale. Elsewhere in the continent there is a stronger emphasis on applied research of obvious economic value. An example is Singapore, whose research base spreads from biomedicine to engineering, two topics that are converging steadily as knowledge advances.

Singapore has two universities in our Asian top 10, the National University of Singapore (NUS) in joint second place, and Nanyang Technological University (NTU) at joint 10th.

NUS is plainly a global research center in a wide range of disciplines. One example of many is the work of Mohan Balasubramanian, winner of the President’s Science and Technology Award, the nation’s top prize for research. His work looks at cell division, one of the most basic processes in biology. Although cell division is an essential part of life, it can also go wrong, most damagingly in cancer. This means his work on the timing and mechanism of cell division is of universal interest.

Nanotechnology is an approach to materials science that could alter everything from surgery to spaceflight. It has been adopted by universities across Asia as a key part of their research portfolio. David Lou of NTU is applying it to the key area of energy storage. His work creates materials structured an atom at a time to store power more effectively in batteries or capacitors.

This technology is growing in importance because of the spread of mobile devices and because of plans to use more solar and wind power around the world. Perhaps for that reason, he has an H-index of 36, a figure that would normally be regarded as unattainable except in medical research.

R&D in the Asian Tigers

Another of the Asian Tiger nations that has made research and innovation a national priority is Korea, which has an impressive three universities in the top 10 of QS University Rankings: Asia. They are led by Seoul National University in fourth place, the highest-ranked university not working primarily in English.

Universities have been key to the success of Korean businesses such as Samsung and LG. These firms’ world lead in display technology, in particular, has been built almost as a joint venture with Korean universities.

One SNU researcher, Kim Sung Hoon, is working on one of the knottiest problems in the world of medicine, the astounding amounts of time and money needed to develop new drugs. He claims that it may be possible to get the time needed from 12 years to perhaps nine and to reduce costs by as much as 80%. This would make new drugs viable. But it would also allow new companies, not least in Korea, to get into a business now dominated by US and European firms.

A third Asian tiger nation that attaches a high value to education is Hong Kong, and the University of Hong Kong appears in second equal place in our ranking this year alongside NUS. It is a broad, general university with a full range of teaching and research, but some of its activities have an unmistakably local flavor.

One that remains stubbornly topical is bird flu, since mainland China is the most frequent source of problem flu epidemics. HKU researchers led by Yo Guan, and working with colleagues from other institutions, recently showed that the H7N9 flu virus can infect experimental animals by aerial transmission. This form of the virus has already been responsible for outbreaks of infection in Shanghai and other parts of China, so this finding is a significant warning sign.

It is noticeable that the fourth of the Asian Tigers, Taiwan, is less visible than the other three as a research power. It is an economy of small businesses and its best-known big companies such as Foxconn, contract maker of high-technology devices in mainland China, tend to use innovation from elsewhere. One area in which Taiwan does have a strong position is the study of the fast-changing Pacific and Asian environment, an area of growing importance in an era of climate change.

Ambitions in India and China

While many Asian nations want to be world research powers, the sheer rate of growth in mainland Chinese research puts it in a league of its own in the region. Government research spending has been growing at 20% a year for six years and at the current rate will overtake European and then US budgets within the coming decade.

China has yet to win its first Nobel Prize in the sciences. But it is becoming a world power in engineering research. An example from Peking University, up from sixth in Asia in 2012 to fifth this year, concerns turbulence.

Turbulence in flows of water, air and other fluids has long been regarded as an important but exceptionally tricky phenomenon, vital to understanding everything from aircraft design to the flow of blood around the body. A Peking group led by Chen Shiyi is a world leader in the study of compressible turbulence, which occurs in high-speed flows such as those found around an airplane wing. This analysis is of technological importance, but also informs astronomers’ understanding of gas clouds in deep space.

Asia’s other billion-person state, India, has an intellectual tradition that deeply respects theoretical fields of knowledge, and has produced distinguished mathematicians and cosmologists.

India’s current base of scientific discovery is not strong by world standards. However, it is building a strong position in research connected to climate change. The existence of the annual monsoon gives India a unique set of problems in this area. In a very wide-ranging initiative, the Indian government is funding research on everything from the loss of Himalayan glaciers to ways of growing cotton with lower carbon emissions.