Over the last decade, the Ministry of Education in Taiwan has established scholarships with universities ranked in the top 100 in the world to encourage Taiwanese students to undertake a PhD program. The Ministry and the university award up to five outstanding Taiwanese students each year a jointly funded scholarship that covers for their tuition fees and a stipend. A scholarship has maximum duration of four years.

These PhD scholarships are now available at 15 prestigious universities in eight countries: Australia, Belgium, France, South Korea, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the UK, and the USA. They include Cambridge University, Oxford University, the California Institute of Technology, Columbia University, Washington University in St. Louis, the University of California Berkeley, the University of Paris-Saclay, the University of Sydney, and the Catholic University of Leuven (KU Leuven) in Belgium.

In March, 2021 Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR) in the Netherlands became the 15th university. The Netherlands is one of the leading countries among the European Union member states for innovation of higher education, and knowledge commercialization, and entrepreneurship. Its major institutions of higher education are highly internationalized and the number of international students at EUR increased from approximately 5,000 in 2016, to more than 7000 in 2020. 

The university is named after Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, a medieval humanist and it is a leading research institution in the fields of economics, business administration, medicine, and social sciences. The Erasmus Medical Center has been ranked the second most influential medical department in the world—after Harvard University—for its contributions to academic journals in the field of medical science. The Erasmus Medical Center has expressed admiration for Taiwan’s medical education and research and welcomes Taiwanese students with majors in clinical medicine and related fields to undertake advanced studies there. 

Outstanding alumni of the university include the late Ruud Lubbers, former prime minister of the Netherlands; Jo Ritzen, a former Minister of Education; Cor Herkströter, a former Chairman of Royal Shell, and the late Professor Jan Tinbergen, the Nobel-prize winning economist, who taught there. The university has been conducting cutting-edge research in various fields for many years with a wide variety of partners, supported by funding from the European Commission and the European Research Council. 

The Taiwan–Erasmus University Rotterdam Scholarship Program is expected to call for applications in November this year. The scholarships are available to Taiwanese students who are interested in undertaking a PhD program there in any field of studies offered by the university, including clinical research.