Vice President Chao-Han Liu
Chao-Han Liu became Vice President of Academia Sinica in October, 2006 after serving as President of the National Central University in Taiwan for 12 years and as Chancellor of the University System of Taiwan for 4 years. He received his BS degree from National Taiwan University in 1960 and PhD in 1965 from Brown University. He started his academic career at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1965 where he taught Electrical Engineering for 25 years before returning to Taiwan in 1990. He is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics.
He is a radio scientist and a leader in international solar terrestrial physics and global change research. In 1988, he and his graduate students pioneered the versatile and inexpensive technology known as Computerized Ionospheric Tomography making possible for global monitoring of the states of the ionosphere for space weather with the crucial participation of worldwide solar terrestrial scientists/engineers including many from developing countries. Also in the late 80¡¦s, together with scientists and engineers from JPL, they proposed the GPS radio occultation technique which has now been developed into one of the most forward looking techniques for collecting global weather and climate data, including the ionosphere. He then helped Taiwan plan and launch FORMOSAT ¡V 3 Constellation (COSMIC) mission in 2006 which uses this technique to vastly increase the quantity and quality of the weather and climate data collected on the global scale, thus enhancing the forecast capability and at the same time providing new opportunities for studying the dynamics of the upper atmosphere. Since June 2007, F3 / COSMIC data have been incorporated in the weather forecasting services in most of the major countries.
He has been a leader in international atmospheric MST (Mesosphere-Stratosphere-Troposphere) Radar research and in early 1980¡¦s led a group of researchers at National Central University to build the Chung Li VHF (Very High Frequency) Radar which is one of the internationally recognized radar centers in the world and has cultivated several generations of MST radar researchers in Taiwan.
He is an internationally recognized leader in Solar Terrestrial Physics. From 1981 to 1998, he played important leadership roles in the Scientific Committee on Solar Terrestrial Physics (SCOSTEP) of ICSU, first as its Scientific Secretary and later as the President. During his tenure, the Committee successfully planned, launched and coordinated three major decade-long international space science programs for solar terrestrial physics, each with the participation of hundreds of scientists all over the world.
Since mid-90¡¦s, he led a group of scientists from different disciplines to carry out global change and sustainable development research in Taiwan and established Taiwan as a regional leader in this field internationally. He is the Chairman of the Southeast Asia Regional Center for START (SARCS) which coordinates the international global change research for the ten Southeast Asia countries.
During his tenure as the President of National Central University, he helped transform the university to become one of the top research universities in Taiwan. He was also the founding Chancellor of the University System of Taiwan which has become a new model for collaboration among universities.
He played an important role in the development of the Space Program in Taiwan, as one of the original members of the planning committee in the early 90¡¦s and later a member of the steering committee for the first 15 years of the program. In 2002, he was asked by the government to co-chair an inter-ministerial committee to draw up a Higher Education Master Plan for Taiwan. The Plan was approved by the government in 2003 and the recommendations are being implemented.
Chao-Han Liu is a member of Academia Sinica and a member of TWAS.
