New Southbound Policy Portal

photo by Lin Min-hsuan
 

After receiving a Taiwan Outstanding Women in Science Award in 2021, in March 2022 Lin I-i was also conferred a Ministry of Education Annual National Chair Professorship, Taiwan’s highest research award.

Observing Lin I-i’s passion for research and her concern for younger academics, one can sum up her research and teaching career in the phrase “gentle yet determined.”

After graduating from NTU’s Department of Atmospheric Sciences, Lin went to the University of Cambridge in the UK to get her PhD in satellite remote sensing. Then she worked at the Centre for Remote Imaging, Sensing, and Processing at the National University of Singapore, where she also did research in satellite oceanography. Thus more than 20 years ago she became well versed in multiple academic fields, giving her a level of multi­disciplin­ary expert­ise that was rare among scientists in Taiwan at the time.

Lin regularly reads journals and takes part in conferences in the fields of satellite remote sensing, ocean sciences, and atmospheric sciences, and keeps in touch with scientists around the world, including in the USA, Europe, and Australia. She arranges her sleeping and waking hours around this multi-time-zone lifestyle, teaching and doing research by day while participating in multinational online conferences by night. Lin always wears the same style of dress in different colors. She says with a laugh that she doesn’t go out shopping and is not on social media, saving her time for research instead.

Keeping abreast of multiple scientific disciplines is hard work, but it opened up new avenues of research for Lin. Using ocean subsurface temperature data derived from NASA satellites, she realized that many cold and warm ocean eddies coexist in the typhoon-rich region of the Pacific Ocean. These eddies rise and fall, leading to variations in subsurface temperature. Overlaying the path of Typhoon Maemi in 2003 on ocean subsurface temperature data, she discovered that the storm had suddenly strengthened from only a Category 1 typhoon into a supertyphoon (a typhoon with sustained surface wind speeds of 130 knots or more) within 24 hours of encountering a warm eddy hidden below the ocean surface, becoming the world’s most powerful tropical cyclone of 2003. Lin notes that traditional weather forecasting methods could not have predicted that Maemi would intensify so rapidly. Lin was the first to discover the important role that ocean eddies play in turning typhoons into supertyphoons. The impact of her research has been wide-reaching and has inspired much follow-­­up work inter­nationally. Exploring the interactions between typhoons and ocean eddies is now a hot topic in both forecasting and research.

Lin often tells her students to keep the big picture in mind. If you look at the world the way a satellite observes the earth from space, you can keep your head clear and find interesting research topics, and discover new ideas and inspiration. In her research, Lin works closely with the inter­national academic community, enabling her not only to freely exchange ideas with colleagues in other countries, but also to demonstrate Taiwan’s research cap­abil­ities to the world.

In 2013 Lin and Pun Iam-fei, then a doctoral can­did­ate working in Lin’s lab and now an assistant professor in the Graduate Institute of Hydrological and Oceanic Sciences at National Central University, used satellite data to explore long-term changes in the seas around the Philippines. They discovered that over the previous 20 years the warm-water layer in the upper ocean subsurface layer had grown thicker, and in an article published in August 2013 they predicted that if a typhoon passed over this area it might develop into an extremely powerful tropical cyclone. As it turned out, Typhoon Haiyan, which devastated the Philippines in Novem­ber of that year, was fed with energy by the thick warm-­water layer, becoming a supertyphoon that remains the most powerful ever recorded in the Northwest Pacific.

Following the publication of a series of papers by Lin and her research team before and after Typhoon Haiyan, the journal Science carried a news focus feature on the storm, and Japan’s NHK television network visited Taiwan to report on her work. Lin has con­tinued to study the interactions between global warming, El Niño, and tropical cyclones, in hopes that better under­standing of how changes in the ocean affect the strength of typhoons can lead to better disaster planning and preparedness.

In 2000, Lin chose to leave her high-paying job in Singapore and return to Taiwan in order to better care for her young child. Having to restart her career from scratch, she was perplexed and anxious, and spent a month thinking about what to do next. She says resol­utely: “For me, science is a noble pursuit through which one can contribute to humankind. I wanted to work on something new, so in the end I decided to do multi­disciplinary research to solve new problems.”

Besides studying supertyphoons, Lin has also researched the earth’s carbon cycle and explored the phenom­enon of algal blooms in “ocean deserts”—areas of sea with low levels of nutrients and ocean chloro­phyll. Marine microalgae, also known as phyto­plankton (photo­synthetic microorganisms that float in the sunlit upper layer of the ocean) can sequester carbon, thus reducing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. At a time when scientists around the world are seeking to reduce carbon emissions, perhaps these algae can make a contribu­tion to carbon reduction.

By analyzing NASA sea color data, Lin discovered that after a typhoon passes across an area of ocean there are dramatic increases in chlorophyll there. ­Typhoons churn up the sea, bringing nutrient-rich ­water from deeper levels to the surface, and this causes explosive growth in ­algae. When these algae perform photo­synthesis, they can capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

When it comes to volcanic eruptions, most researchers focus on aspects such as geology or air pollution. But Lin followed a different path. While analyzing satel­lite data she noticed that after the eruption of a volcano near Guam, there was an increase in algal activity in the surrounding ocean. Lin expanded her work into a fourth field—volcanology—and spent a few years reading large numbers of papers about vol­can­ism. When she found out that there was a volcan­ologist in the USA who had collected samples in this area of the world, she excitedly waited until 3 a.m. Taiwan time to contact this scientist at the University of New Mexico. After hearing Lin out, he sent samples of vol­canic ash to Taiwan to be analyzed at the Academia Sin­ica. Through this inter­national collaboration Lin and her colleagues were able to publish the first paper to ­suggest that volcanic ash can stimulate significant bio­geochemical and carbon responses in the low-nutrient, low-chlorophyll regions of the western North Pacific.

Lin’s inexhaustible energy has inspired others. For example, a doctoral candidate working in Lin’s lab named Huang Hsiao Ching had in fact felt little interest in her classes as a freshman in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at NTU, and had even thought of changing her major. But in her junior year she took Lin’s class on remote sensing and discovered what a broad field it is. By applying one’s judgment and intuition to data and graphs, one can make novel findings, and this gave Huang the scope to develop her talents.

Huang recalls that when she first joined Lin’s lab 17 years ago, Lin’s son was only two years old, and sometimes Lin had so much on her plate that she had to bring him with her to work. Huang has watched as Lin has juggled her various roles and found that even though Lin has encountered difficulties in life, she has always been able to quickly adjust and look at obstacles posit­ively while maintaining her passion for science. Huang saw Lin as a role model as a woman scientist and decided to follow in her footsteps and pursue research in earth sciences.

Lin states that there should be no gender distinctions in science, and there are many outstanding women scientists in the world. However, being a mother at the same time can be exhausting. “We are happy to take on the duties of motherhood, but more young women would be willing to become scientists if the research environ­ment were friendlier.” Lin says that many women scientists suffer from burnout and give up their research because their children require so much care in their preschool years, so it would be better if there were options for flex­ible part-time work or working from home.

With her deep understanding of the struggles faced by scientists who are mothers, Lin thoughtfully avoids having researchers work when they must pick up or drop off their children at school or activities. She also prepares toys and stickers for kids to play with when their scientist moms need to bring them in to work. She believes that creating a family-friendly environment that allows scientist mothers to make satisfactory childcare arrangements enables them to concentrate even better on their work.

Last year Lin began offering a course at NTU called “Female Scientists: Research, Life, Struggle, Reflection, and Outlook.” She hopes to enable all students, male and female, to understand the difficulties faced by female scientists who also have families to take care of and thereby improve the research environment in the future.

Though scientist moms can face many obstacles, especially when children are young, Lin is much inspired by a verse from the Book of Isaiah in the Bible: “But those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles.” These are the words she uses to encourage young women scientists not to give up in the face of stress and challenges, but to keep the fire of hope alive in their hearts as they wait for the light of a new dawn.

For more pictures, please click《Demystifying Supertyphoons: Multidisciplinary Scientist Lin I-i》