Liu Chen

Liu Chen (; born February 4, 1946) is a Taiwanese-American theoretical physicist who has made original contributions to many aspects of plasma physics. He is known for the discoveries of kinetic Alfven waves, toroidal Alfven eigenmodes, and energetic particle modes; the theories of geomagnetic pulsations, Alfven wave heating, and fishbone oscillations, and the first formulation of nonlinear gyrokinetic equations. Chen retired from University of California, Irvine (UCI) in 2012, assuming the title professor emeritus of physics and astronomy.

Early life and education Chen was born in 1946 in Hangzhou, China, to a family whose ancestral home is in Yuyao. Chen's ancestral family name is Huang (黃). He is a descendant of the philosopher Zongxi Huang (黃宗羲). His great-grandfather, Cheng-yi Huang (黃承乙) was the mayor of Taiwan County (now Taichung City) during the Qing reign of the Guangxu Emperor.

In 1950, after the Kuomintang defeat in the Chinese Civil War, Chen left mainland China during the Great Retreat with his mother, Shyue Yan King Chen (金學言; 1916–2006), and three siblings. They joined his father, Lee Chen (陳禮; 1913–2003), at the Tiu Keng Leng refugee camp in Hong Kong, where he began his education. The Chen family then moved to Taiwan in 1951.

After graduating from the Affiliated Senior High School of National Taiwan Normal University in 1962, Chen attended National Taiwan University, earning his bachelor's degree in 1966. He then left Taiwan in 1967 to complete graduate studies in the United States. He earned a Master of Science (M.S.) from Washington State University, Pullman, in 1969, and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1972. His doctoral dissertation, completed under Charles K. Birdsall, was titled, "I. Heating of Magnetized Plasmas by Large-Amplitude Electric Field. II. Reduction of the Grid Effects in Simulation Plasmas."

Academic career From 1972 to 1974, Chen did his postdoctoral research with Akira Hasegawa at the Bell Labs. They developed a theory for long-period magnetic pulsations in the magnetosphere based on resonant coupling between hydromagnetic compressional waves and transverse Alfvén continuous spectrum. In 2000, Chen and coworkers elucidated that drift wave turbulence can spontaneously generate coherent zonal flows via intensity-modulation interactions, resulting in turbulence self-regulation. This nonlinear process has a broad scope of applications and has been generalized to the zonal structures in charged particle phase space. Hangzhou, in 2004, and Visiting Kuo-Ting Chair Professor at National Central University, Zhongli, Taiwan, in 2007. From 2006 to 2016, Chen served as the founding director of the Institute for Fusion Theory and Simulation (IFTS) at Zhejiang University. In 2016, Chen became the director emeritus.

Chen has also published a graduate textbook Waves and Instabilities in Plasmas (World Scientific Publication Co., 1987), and nurtured generations of graduate students and postdocs worldwide.

Personal life Chen married to Shingshah Lee (李醒夏) in August 1969. They have one son, Chen Pei-jin (陳培進).

Honors and awards 1981, Fellow, American Physical Society 2004, John Dawson Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research, from the American Physical Society 2008, Hannes Alfvén Prize, from the European Physical Society 2009, Fellow, American Association for Advancement of Sciences 2011, Fellow, American Geophysical Union 2012, James Clerk Maxwell Prize for Plasma Physics, from the American Physical Society 2019, Subrahmanyan Chandresekhar Prize, from the Association of Asia Pacific Physical Societies 2022, Academician, Academia Sinica 2023, Yushan Fellow, Ministry of Education, ROC 2026, Distinguished Alumnus of National Taiwan University