NTU HIGHLIGHTS

Encouraging female excellence in science-related teaching and research has always been an important goal for NTU in creating a gender-friendly educational environment, and STEM fields can also benefit from a greater gender balance. Chung-Hsuan Yang, a student who was awarded a scholarship for a direct-entry doctoral degree program in the Graduate Institute of Electronics Engineering in 2019, has consistently achieved outstanding milestones year after year.

During her undergraduate studies in the NTU Department of Electrical Engineering, Chung-Hsuan was introduced to digital chip design courses and experiments, and found a great sense of accomplishment in fulfilling her imagination and designing circuits with improved functions and performance. Later on, she came upon a topic related to next-generation gene sequencing analysis during an internship, which sparked her deep interest in the wonders of biogenetics. Chung-Hsuan aspires to contribute to human health and society by leveraging her interdisciplinary research skills in digital circuits and bioinformatics, and envisions a future where her work brings real progress. This ambition has became her unwavering motivation.

Under the guidance of electrical engineering Professor Chia-Hsiang Yang, Chung-Hsuan and her research team won a gold medal in the Application category of the Macronix Golden Silicon Awards in the first year of her PhD for her work on a system-on-chip for next-generation sequencing to identify gene variants. By integrating variant calling algorithms and a biological database, they created the fastest next-generation gene sequencing data analysis system available, reducing analysis time from 3 days to just 37 minutes. Their groundbreaking research was published in the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits in January 2021.

In addition, the team’s proposal for an efficient and accurate implementation method for an FPGA-based short-read mapping system won them the Best Design Award in the 2022 IEEE Asian Solid-State Circuits Conference A-SSCC Student Design Contest, with Chung-Hsuan credited as the first author.

In their research this year, Chung-Hsuan's team has achieved a remarkable feat by inventing the world's first fully integrated genome analysis accelerator for next-generation sequencing. This breakthrough technology overcomes previous limitations by enabling comprehensive genome analysis beyond variant identification, while ensuring improved accuracy. The team's work, which was presented at the 2023 International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), features a genome data analysis accelerator incorporating paired-end short-read mapping, with both its algorithms and hardware architecture optimized to minimize hardware resources and attain full integration and high accuracy.

Direct-entry doctoral degree programs provide more time for students to devote directly to their research, allowing Chung-Hsuan to give her research topic full attention and ,hopefully, inspiring more women to enter STEM fields.