Liu Chao-Han is a pioneer in solar-terrestrial physics and remote sensing research. He is one of the founding leaders of Taiwan’s Space Program. He is a foreign member of the National Academy of Engineering, a member of the World Academy of Sciences, and an Academician of the Academia Sinica. He served as President of National Central University, Chancellor of the University System of Taiwan and the Vice President of the Academia Sinica. Shortly after returning to Taiwan in 1990, based on his earlier research he proposed and guided the implementation of the Constellation Observation System for Meteorology Ionosphere Climate, FORMOSAT-III/ COSMIC, in collaboration with UCAR and JPL in the US. This system, launched 4/2006, is a 6-satellite constellation using GPS radio occultation technique that revolutionized remote sensing of the Earth’s atmosphere. The system has led to the daily collection of up to 2500 calibrated high-vertical resolution data for atmospheric temperature and humidity as well as ionospheric electron density profiles over the globe, and enabled the daily weather forecast, including space weather, to achieve drastic improvement.

Earlier, in the late 1980’s, Liu and his students innovated a versatile and inexpensive technology known as “Computerized Ionosphere Tomography (CIT) which was adopted for the remote sensing of ionospheres. Earlier in his career, Liu developed a scintillation theory, including the effects of multiple scattering, and made seminal contributions to pulse propagation problems in turbulent media, critical to understanding interaction of radio waves and the atmosphere and crucial to optical communication. Liu also established a VHF Radar system at Central University in Taiwan to investigate the atmospheric waves and turbulence. Through his work in Solar-Terrestrial Physics he has established himself as a leader in international Space Weather research.

Since the mid-90’s, he led a group of scientists with different disciplinary background to carry out global change and sustainability research in Taiwan and established Taiwan as a regional leader in this field internationally.