Ming-Chih Lai
Dr. Ming-Chih Lai received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University (NYU) in 1998, under the supervision of Prof. Charles S. Peskin. His Ph.D. thesis won Kurt O. Friedrichs Prize for an outstanding dissertation in Mathematics at Courant Institute in 1999. After his graduation, he spent a year as a Research Associate in Physics department of Duke University and then he returned to Taiwan and took an Assistant Professorship in National Chung Cheng University from August 1999 to July 2002. He moved to National Chiao Tung University (NCTU) in August 2002 and has stayed there ever since. He held the department Chairman from 2007/08-2009/07 and the Dean position of College of Science from 2021/08-2024/07. He is currently the life-time Chair Professor of National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (NYCU). Dr. Lai’s major research interests are mainly on Numerical Methods for PDEs and Computational Fluid Dynamics, especially in developing mathematical models and numerical methods for incompressible fluids with interfaces. Very recently, he has begun to develop Machine Learning methodologies to solve PDEs which traditional methods are not tractable or hard to implement. Due to his outstanding research results, he has won two times of National Science Council (now NSTC) Outstanding Research Award (2003, 2011), Academic Award of Mathematical Society of ROC (2011), Academic Award of Ministry of Education (2014), and two times of National Chair Professorship of Ministry of Education (2017, 2024). He was also elected as an outstanding Alumnus of NCHU (2018), and the first class of TWSIAM Fellow (2021).
Besides his outstanding research performance, he was the major founder of “Taiwan Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (TWSIAM)” which permanent society address is located at NYCU. He was the President of SIAM East Asia Section (EASIAM) in Year 2013-2014 and is the first Taiwanese researcher holding such important international society position. He also served the Deputy Director of Mathematics Division of National Center for Theoretical Sciences (NCTS, 2016-2020), the President of Mathematics Society of ROC (2016-2017), and the President of TWSIAM (2018/06-2020/05). Starting from August 2024, he acts as the Director General of Department of Natural Sciences and Sustainable Development of National Science and Technology Council (NSTC).
