MUST Distinguished Professor elected as Foreign Member of the US National Academy of Engineering

Distinguished Professor of the Space Science Institute of Macau University of Science and Technology, Academician Lee Lou-Chuang was elected a Foreign Member of the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE) on February 7, 2018, for his innovative contributions to space physics and his technical leadership in the FORMOSAT/COSMIC satellite program.

Academician Lee Lou-Chuang is a world-renowned scientist and science and technology administrator, who mainly specializes in the field of space physics, and has made profound far-reaching impact on areas such as radio communication, space physics, space weather forecasting and atmospheric physics. He has made a significant breakthrough in the study of strong scattering of radio waves; caused by turbulent plasmas, such scattering generates intensity scintillations, angular broadening and pulse smearing, and other phenomena. Academician Lee has developed a non-perturbative theoretical approach to strong scattering, which has been widely applied to different scientific areas, including radio wave, laser beam transmission and seismic wave scattering. In 1992, for the first time he successfully simulated the dynamic formation of a solar prominence, which showed that the prominence mass is supplied by siphon-type flows induced by thermal instability. This discovery has increased human knowledge on fundamental solar physics phenomena like solar prominences, geomagnetic activity and space weather forecasting.

Academician Lee was Director of the National Space Program Office and the Founding President of the National Applied Research Laboratories in Taiwan, where he led the science and engineering teams, and successfully launched the FORMOSAT-2 and FORMOSAT-3 satellite programs. In 2003, the FORMOSAT-2 science team discovered gigantic jets in the atmosphere. These jets are observed to be located between the top-end of thunderclouds and the ionosphere (approximately 16km – 90km altitude), which establishes a direct optical and electric link between a thundercloud and the ionosphere. This has confirmed the atmospheric electricity theory proposed by Nobel laureate, C.T.R. Wilson, in 1925.

Academician Lee has won a great number of academic honors, including the S. Chandrasekhar Prize of Plasma Physics, the Presidential Science Prize, member of the World Academy of Sciences, member of the International Academy of Astronautics, Fulbright Distinguished Scholar, and others; he was elected Academician of Academia Sinica, Taiwan, in 2002.

The US National Academy of Engineering is the highest academic organization of the engineering field in the country. In 2018, the Academy has elected 83 members and 16 foreign associates, half of whom are from academy, while the other half from industry. Including the newly elected members, the membership of the NAE has been brought to 2,293 and the number of foreign associates to 262.