On February 19, President Tatsurou Ishibashi of Kyushu University, Japan, and President Robert Jones of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), USA, led delegations to visit National Taiwan University (NTU). Together with NTU President Wen-Chang Chen, they signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) for the NTU-Kyushu-UIUC Joint Center and unveiled the center’s plaque. This collaboration aims to expand inter-university exchanges to a trilateral framework, systematically promoting faculty and student exchanges, as well as research collaborations in fields such as medicine, engineering, agriculture, and humanities and social sciences. Deputy Minister of Education Liu Meng-chi also attended the luncheon to congratulate the three universities on this new milestone in international cooperation.
Both Kyushu University and UIUC are key partner institutions of NTU. The exchange of students, dual-degree programs, and other collaborative efforts between these universities have been steadily developing. Numerous bilateral meetings have further connected their engineering, electrical engineering, agricultural, and social sciences departments. Additionally, Kyushu University and UIUC established a key sister school relationship in 2019.