Ken P. Chong
Ken P. Chong. He was previously the Engineering Advisor, Interim Division Director and program director of Mechanics and Materials at various times for 21 years at the U.S. National Science Foundation.
Early life and education
After attending Queen Elizabeth School, Hong Kong, Chong graduated from National Cheng Kung University with a B.S. in civil engineering and structural engineering. He then obtained an M.S. in structural mechanics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and earned an M.A., M.S.E., and Ph.D. in solid mechanics and structural engineering from Princeton University in 1969. After receiving his doctorate, he completed post-doctoral management training at the Federal Executive Institute, for senior federal executives, Class 221, 1996.Academic career
He has published over 200 refereed papers, and is the author or coauthor of twelve books including "Elasticity in Engineering Mechanics", "Modeling and Simulation-Based Life Cycle Engineering", "Mechanics of Oil Shale", and "Materials for the New Millennium". He has taught at the University of Wyoming, University of Hong Kong, University of Houston, and George Washington University and had been visiting professor at MIT and University of Washington. Listed in Stanford University top 2% of scientists globally, Oct. 2022 He received the Lifetime Achievement Award in October 2024 from the Chinese Association for Science and Technology in the US in recognition of his “lifelong contributions to Science and Engineering and their lasting impact on Society”.His biographical profile is cited in the American Men and Women of Science and in 2008 he was elected a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. He is also a fellow of American Academy of Mechanics, SEM and ASCE. as well as a distinguished member of ASCE. He was a visiting professor at MIT in 1988 and University of Washington in 1987. He has been a visiting professor at Tsinghua University ; an honorary professor in 1981 at the University of Hong Kong as well as the 49th honorary professor at the Harbin Institute of Technology from 2013 .
In the 1970s Chong pioneered the analysis and development of re-usable, energy and structural efficient sandwich panels with cold-formed steel facings and rigid foamed cores, now widely used in industrial and commercial building systems . He also developed new semi-circular fracture specimens for core-based brittle materials, used around the world, widely cited, is now a standard . His research on the design of hybrid girders has been incorporated into AISC manuals. His seminal experimental research on sweet spots in the 70’s changed the design of tennis and other rackets. At the University of Wyoming, he has been the principal investigator of 20 plus federally funded research projects, mostly on mechanics of solids. Currently he is working on smart materials, cloaking of seismic waves and other projects.
He was a co-founder and honorary editor of the Journal of Smart & Nano Materials and Editor of the CRC Press book series . He has been involved in the planning of the new Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 1988-89. Since 2011 he has been serving on engineering panels at Hong Kong Research Grants Council'. He has also been working as an expert panelist with the Hong Kong University Grants Committee' and the Innovation and Technology Commission'.
He received numerous awards and honors, including the 1997 ASCE Edmund Friedman Professional Recognition Award ; Distinguished Member, ASCE ; NCKU Distinguished Alumnus Award ; ASME 2011 Ted Belytschko Applied Mechanics Award for “significant contributions in the practice of engineering mechanics”, and the NSF highest Distinguished Service Award for “his exemplary direction of the Mechanics Program and for his role in nurturing the emerging field of nanomechanics, including his planning, encouragement, and support of the NSF Nanomechanics Summer Institute”. He delivered the Mindlin Lecture at Columbia University in 2005, the Sadowsky Lecture at RPI in 2006, the Raouf Lecture at the US Naval Academy in 2012, the ASME Thurston Lecture in 2014, and the Distinguished Lecture at the University of Macau in 2015.