Academician Lou-Chuang Lee was elected a Foreign Member of the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE), the academy announced on February 7, 2018. Dr. Lee received the honor for his seminal contributions to space physics and technical leadership in the FORMOSAT/COSMIC program.

Prof. Lee is a world-renowned scientist and administrator. His seminal achievements have made significant broad impacts over radio communication, space physics, space weather forecasting and atmospheric physics. Prof. Lee achieved a significant breakthrough in the theory of strong scattering of radio waves by turbulent plasmas in 1975. Such scattering produces a wide variety of observed phenomena such as intensity scintillations, angular broadening and pulse smearing. Prof. Lee developed a theoretical approach to strong scattering that is non-perturbative. The approach is so powerful that it has been applied to different sub-fields, such as the propagation of radio wave, laser beam and seismic wave in a random medium.

In 1974 satellite observations discovered that the Earth emits very intense radio waves in the region about 6000 meters above the auroral ionosphere. Other planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus) in our solar system also emit strong radio waves. Prof. Lee proposed a kinetic electron cyclotron maser theory in 1979 that successfully explains the observed strong radio emission from Earth, Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus. The kinetic approach of electron cyclotron maser has also been applied to the generation of Ka-band radio waves.

Solar prominences are not only a fundamental solar physics phenomenon but they are important for causing geomagnetic activity at the Earth and for space weather forecasting. Prof. Lee published a paper in 1992 that for the first time successfully simulated the dynamic formation of a solar prominence within the magnetic arcade. It also showed that the prominence mass is supplied by siphon-type flows induced by thermal instability.

Dr. Lee, as Director of the National Space Program Office and the founding President of the National Applied Research Laboratories in Taiwan, has led the science and engineering teams implementing the FORMOSAT-2 and FORMOSAT-3 satellite programs. The FORMOSAT-2 satellite, launched on May 20, 2004, is to provide remote sensing data and the first satellite to investigate transient luminous events (TLEs), which include red sprites, blue jets, elves, and gigantic jets. In 2003, the FORMOSAT-2 science team discovered “gigantic jets” in the atmosphere. These jets are located above thunder clouds. The observed gigantic jets establish a direct optical and electric link between a thundercloud (altitude ~ 16 km) and the ionosphere at ~90 km altitude, confirming the prediction by C.T.R. Wilson (Nobel Laureate) in 1925. Formosat-3/COSMIC, a joint Taiwan/USA space mission with 6 satellites, was launched in 2006 to conduct GPS radio occultation, collecting atmospheric data used by weather bureaus worldwide to improve operational weather forecasting capability. There are over 3000 worldwide registered scientific users from 81 countries.

Election to NAE is among the highest professional distinctions that can be accorded to an engineer. The membership honors those who have made outstanding contributions to “engineering research, practice, or education.” and to the "pioneering of new and developing fields of technology”. In 2018, NAE elects 83 members and 16 foreign members from academy and industry. Including the newly elected members, the membership has been brought to 2293 and the number of foreign members to 262.