Chen Kai-feng, an NTU PhD, is a rising star in the international physics community. (Hsueh Chi-kuang)

People say, given the choice, hire family. But Taiwanese academia’s efforts to avoid “inbreeding” have resulted in an unspoken rule against schools employing their own PhDs. Even National Taiwan University, the most prestigious school in the country, rarely hires PhDs fresh out of its own graduate programs.

Chen Kai-feng, an associate professor in NTU’s physics department, is an exception to that rule. Born in 1979, Chen completed his master’s degree and PhD at NTU (his undergraduate alma mater) in a record-setting four years, and went on to be the department’s youngest associate professor. How did Chen, a homegrown PhD, overcome Taiwanese academia’s bias for Western-trained talent?

In 2008, the global physics community’s most important body for scholarly exchange, the International Union for Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP), awarded its first Young Scientist Prize in Particle Physics. With hundreds of young scholars from top-tier schools in Europe, the US, and Japan all giving the award their best shot, the prize went to Chen Kai-feng, a young NTU physicist trained right here in Taiwan.

Chen was just 28 at the time, but while his prize was a first for Taiwan, the honor was nothing new to him. After all, he had completed his Master’s degree and PhD at NTU in just four years, and had immediately become an associate professor, skipping over the grueling research-and-teaching assistant-professor stage of the typical academic career.

In 2011 Fermilab Today, the periodical of the US-based Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, published an article entitled “Searching for a Fourth Generation” that praised the excellent work being done by Chen and his research team. The article marked the first time the publication had lauded the work of a non-American research team.