Chang-Chuan Chan

On behalf of the College of Public Health (CPH), National Taiwan University (NTU), I want to welcome you to the international conference on “Precision Science in Life and Health” in Matsu. The is also the first conference we organize to celebrate the launch of Population Health Research Center (PHRC) at NTU. PHRC is established in CPH funded by Ministry of Education and Ministry of Science and Technology of Republic of China, aiming to develop a world-class precision population health embracing multi-disciplinary fields of environmental factors, genetic and epigenetic variants, life style factors, socio-behavior determinants, and relevant characteristics related to health care delivery.

It is truly our honor to have 70 inter-disciplinary elite professors and professionals from Taiwan and abroad together here to share their thoughts on how to improve population health by evidence-based precision population health science. It is also our intention to invite 60 students from several universities in Taiwan to participate in this conference with eyes on cultivating future leaders in population health science of the next generation.

To realize the goal of precision population health in terms of translational research and public health practice, we need community-based health-related campaigns. This is why we come to Matsu, an offshore island between Taiwan and China, where our CPH of NTU has devoted ourselves to this community since 1996 when the local government was challenged with high gastric cancer mortality. Since then, community-based campaigns with different intervention programs evolving with three transitional phases have been delivered to Matsunese and their emigrants in Taiwan. We have learned so much from Matsu Community-based Cohort (MACOM) research in the past and would like to share with you our successful cases of gastric cancer and other chronic diseases prevention in Matsu in this meeting. We also like to invite your participation in our future study on precision population health research at the PHRC, which needs inter-discipline, inter-school, and international cooperation to make it happen. Some of our current thoughts on this research is provided in the supplementary booklet “Matsu Community-based Cohort (MACOM) Researches by Population Health Research Centre (PHRC)”.

I wish you all have a very successful meeting and a very pleasant and memorable stay in Matsu and Taiwan.