How to Find a PhD Supervisor in Taiwan (and Get Funded)

Search "funded PhD Taiwan" and you'll usually land on one of two things: a Ministry of Education scholarship flyer that assumes you're already admitted somewhere, or Academia Sinica's TIGP page, which is genuinely excellent but covers only one specific joint-PhD route among several. What neither tells you upfront is that Taiwan doesn't run one PhD funding system. It runs at least three parallel ones, government scholarships, Academia Sinica's joint program, and NSTC-linked research funding, plus university-level tuition waivers on top, and figuring out which one actually fits your situation changes both how you apply and whether you need a professor's agreement before you do.

Three funding layers, not one

The first layer is the MOE Taiwan Scholarship, a government award administered by Taiwan's Ministry of Education and applied for through Taiwan's overseas representative offices in your home country. It pays toward tuition and a living allowance, but it doesn't get you admitted anywhere, you generally need university admission (or to be actively applying) first, and the scholarship itself runs on a fixed annual application window. The second layer is Academia Sinica's Taiwan International Graduate Program (TIGP), a joint PhD track run in partnership with Taiwan's leading universities, entirely in English, with its own stipend and its own application process, separate from a normal department admission. The third layer is NSTC, the National Science and Technology Council, which funds PhD research two different ways: a competitive national fellowship paid to the student, and, far more commonly, a research-assistant stipend paid out of an individual professor's own NSTC project grant. Layered on top of all three, individual universities like NTU, NTHU, and NYCU also run their own internal tuition waivers and advisor-funded stipends, independent of any of the above. A generic "Taiwan PhD funding" search tends to surface only whichever one of these four the page happens to be written about.

TIGP: the Academia Sinica joint PhD track

TIGP currently runs 14 PhD programs jointly between Academia Sinica and partner universities, spanning fields from chemical biology and bioinformatics to nano science, earth system science, and, more recently, social computing and East Asian studies. All coursework is in English. The structural difference from a standard PhD application is that you don't apply to a named supervisor upfront: you apply online (through TIGP's own application portal, and to only one TIGP program at a time), get admitted into the program itself, and then complete at least two lab rotations in your first year, one at an Academia Sinica institute and one at the enrolled partner university, before settling on an advisor. TIGP students also take a one-year Mandarin course and serve as a teaching assistant for at least one semester as standard program requirements. The published stipend is a first-year rate of NT$34,000 plus an additional NT$6,000, for a combined NT$40,000 a month, tax-free and without a registration fee, with an extension into a second year for students who perform well, figures worth confirming against TIGP's current scholarship page for the year you'd actually enroll, since program funding gets revised.

The MOE Taiwan Scholarship

The Taiwan Scholarship is administered by the Ministry of Education and applied for through Taiwan's overseas missions abroad, with an annual application window that has run from February through March in recent cycles. It's structured to cover tuition and miscellaneous fees up to a set amount per semester, historically around NT$40,000, plus a monthly living allowance, historically around NT$20,000 for postgraduate recipients, for a maximum of four years for doctoral study. Treat both figures as a baseline to confirm against the current year's official MOE guidelines rather than a fixed number, since scholarship terms get republished annually. The scholarship doesn't function as an admissions channel on its own, you typically need to already hold, or be actively pursuing, admission to a specific Taiwanese university and program before or alongside the scholarship application, which is where identifying the right department and, for research-based programs, the right supervisor, has to happen first.

NSTC funding: a national fellowship, and a far more common indirect route

NSTC (formerly MOST, the Ministry of Science and Technology, renamed in 2022) funds PhD research in two distinct ways that generic guides often blur together. The first is the NSTC Graduate Research Fellowship, a competitive award reported at NT$40,000 a month for up to three years, aimed at incoming first-year PhD students, selected partly through direct academic review and partly through an allocation tied to how much NSTC project funding each institution has received in recent years. Its published eligibility explicitly excludes students holding Hong Kong, Macau, or mainland Chinese student status and excludes anyone in full-time paid employment; whether other international nationalities are eligible in a given cycle is worth confirming directly with your target university's international affairs office before you rely on it. The second, much more common route is indirect: a huge share of PhD research assistantships in Taiwan are paid out of an individual professor's own NSTC research project grant, not a national competition. That means getting funded this way is really a decision one specific professor makes about their own budget, which makes identifying professors who currently hold active NSTC grants in your subfield, and contacting them directly, the actual mechanism, not a form you fill out centrally.

University-level tuition waivers and stipends

Individual universities layer their own scholarships and assistantships on top of all of the above, and the terms genuinely differ by institution and even by department, so treat any of the following as a starting range to confirm, not a guaranteed number. NYCU (National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University) has publicized a PhD stipend around NT$33,000 a month combined with a tuition waiver for an initial period, alongside a minimum GPA for renewal and a requirement to take at least two Mandarin courses. NTHU (National Tsing Hua University) has publicized a PhD stipend range roughly between NT$20,000 and NT$40,000 a month depending on field, layered with a tuition waiver, with humanities and social science fields sometimes sitting toward the lower end. NTU (National Taiwan University) runs multiple scholarship categories with tuition waivers and stipends that vary by department and funding source, some of it awarded automatically as part of the admission review, some of it tied to a specific advisor's or department's own budget. Where a stipend is described as advisor-funded rather than centrally awarded, it usually comes with a teaching- or research-assistant responsibility attached, and it's the professor, not a central scholarship office, who actually decides whether to offer it.

Where a signed supervisor agreement actually sits in the process

TIGP is a genuine exception here: you're admitted to the program first and matched to a supervisor through lab rotations afterward, so there's no professor agreement to lock in before you apply. Everywhere else, for a standard department-based PhD and especially for any position paid off a professor's own NSTC project grant, the practical sequence runs closer to what applicants encounter in continental Europe: a professor's willingness to take you on functions as a real prerequisite even when a university's formal admission rules don't spell it out as a hard document requirement. Department admissions committees weigh applications more favorably when a named faculty member has already indicated interest, and a research assistantship funded out of a grant obviously can't happen without that professor choosing to offer it. Confirm the specific expectation with each department directly, since a professional master's-style coursework program and a research-heavy PhD lab can have genuinely different norms even at the same university.

Visa basics for international students

International students staying in Taiwan for more than 90 days apply for a Resident Visa for Foreign Students through the Bureau of Consular Affairs (BOCA), submitted in person at a Taiwanese overseas representative office in your home country, generally recommended 3 to 4 months ahead of your program's start date. The application requires a health certificate completed after a medical exam, which typically needs to be legalized before submission alongside your other documents. After arriving in Taiwan, you must apply for an Alien Resident Certificate (ARC) within 15 days, which is the document that actually lets you legally reside and study for your program's full duration, and it's renewed annually rather than issued once for the whole PhD.

How to actually find professors

Outside TIGP's rotation system, locating a professor starts with the department faculty list at your target university, most Taiwanese universities publish English-language faculty pages by department with research areas and recent publications listed. For fields covered by Academia Sinica, its roughly two dozen research institutes, organized by discipline rather than by university, each publish their own faculty and lab pages and are worth checking even outside a TIGP application, since some Academia Sinica researchers co-supervise or host students through partner-university arrangements outside the formal TIGP track. A professor's recent publication record is the signal worth checking before you write to them, since it tells you whether they're actively running a lab likely to have NSTC project funding right now, which is the funding source most PhD research-assistant positions in Taiwan actually run on.

A practical search order

• Decide whether TIGP's joint-program, rotation-based structure fits your field, since it changes whether you need a supervisor lined up before you apply at all.
• If you're targeting a standard department PhD instead, identify professors actively publishing in your subfield at NTU, NTHU, NYCU, or another target university, since that's also where an NSTC-funded research assistantship would actually originate.
• Email the professor directly, referencing their specific recent work, well ahead of your target university's admission deadline and any MOE Taiwan Scholarship or NSTC fellowship window you plan to apply through.
• Once you have an agreement or admission in hand, confirm the exact funding source, MOE scholarship, NSTC fellowship, professor's project grant, or university tuition waiver, and start the Resident Visa process with the university's international affairs office.

GradScoutFunding is built for the identification and outreach part of that sequence: it searches professors by field and country, confirms they're actively publishing, and drafts a personalized first email grounded in their real recent paper for you to review and send yourself. It never sends anything automatically, and it can confirm a professor is active, not that a specific fellowship or funding line will actually come through, that depends on the funding body's own decision. The free tier gives 2 credits with no card required, and paid credit packs are one-time purchases that never expire.

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