Academia Sinica President Chi-Huey Wong and the Vice Chancellor of the University of California, Davis, Harris Lewin signed a collaborative agreement on September 12, 2014 at Academia Sinica that aims to foster closer future collaboration between the two institutions. 

The agreement is aimed to promote a cooperative relationship between Academia Sinica and the University of California, Davis. Cooperative activities will include joint workshops/symposiums, and graduate student and postdoctoral fellow exchange programs that will mainly focus on the areas of agriculture, human health and microbiome research. Academia Sinica and UC Davis have a long history of close collaboration. The two institutions signed a collaborative agreement between 2007-2012, and since 2011, with the assistance of the Institute of Biological Chemistry, the Academia Sinica Taiwan International Graduate Program in Chemical Biology and Molecular Biophysics (TIGP-CBMB) and UC Davis have conducted a Quarter Abroad Program that aims to provide mutual learning opportunities for students from both institutions.

During his visit to Academia Sinica, Prof. Lewin also gave a special lecture entitled "Mammalian Chromosome Evolution". In the lecture, Prof. Lewin discussed the recently developed Reference Assisted Chromosome Assembly (RACA) algorithm, which is a powerful approach for predicting chromosome organization from Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) assemblies that include sequences from long insert libraries. Prof. Lewin was awarded the Wolf Prize in Agriculture in 2011 and was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2013.

UC Davis provides an exceptionally rich environment for multidisciplinary investigations. UC Davis is geographically the largest of the ten campuses of the UC system, second largest in overall budget, and third largest in student enrollment.