Professor Fa-yu Cheng, the first son of a physician, was born on October 16, 1916 at Tainan, Taiwan. After 11 years' elementary and junior high school education in Taiwan, he went to Japan to continue his education at the Eighth Senior High School, Department as well as Institute to Philosophy of Kyoto University. He did some researches on perception then. After the second-world-war, the situation was so chaotic that he had to quit his graduate study and came back to Taiwan in 1946. He was soon appointed as a lecturer at Department of philosophy, National Taiwan University. In 1949, the university founded the first Department of Psychology in Taiwan and he became a faculty member of the department. He was promoted to the rank of associate professor in 1953 and, three years later, went to Dr. N. E. Miller's lab at Yale University for one year. He earned his professorship in 1959 and retired in 1986. He died of stroke on February 12, 1996. During those early years, the Department of Psychology had very limited resources in every aspect. He managed to open the course of experimental psychology, arranged various experiments, and discussed critically those experimental designs with students, so that students had opportunity to experience the scientific way to study psychological phenomena. He had also trained a technician who became the only person in Taiwan capable of manufacturing various psychological instruments to support psychological researches for more than 20 years. In addition, he was the most rigorous researcher of the department during that difficult period. Most of his researches were on learning and related topics. He also explored the link between learning processes and psychological disorders as well as personality. He has made the scientific study of psychology as the tradition of the Department. He is not only the founder of experimental psychology, but also the first researcher in the fields of experimental clinical psychology and experimental personality in Taiwan.