Former Professor of Engineering Choon Fong Shih was named the founding president of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology this month. Shih, currently the president of the National University of Singapore, will assume his duties as KAUST's president Dec. 1.
Ali Ibrahim Al-Naimi, the Saudi oil minister and chairman of the board of trustees at KAUST, cited Shih's work building the National University of Singapore into a world-class university as a reason for the hire, according to a press release. Shih, a Harvard alum, moved to Singapore in 1996 after 15 years of teaching at Brown. He became president in 2000.
Neither Shih nor KAUST officials could be reached for comment.
KAUST is an international, graduate-level research university established by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. The university, set to open in 2009, is "dedicated to inspiring a new age of scientific achievement in the kingdom that will also benefit the region and the world," according to its Web site.
KAUST will not establish schools or departments but will be organized instead into interdisciplinary research institutes. Four have been established so far, including a Materials Science and Engineering Institute, and each contains various research centers and programs within its field.
At Brown, Shih worked in the Division of Engineering researching the field of fracture mechanics. Fracture mechanics researchers study the performance of cracked bodies under stress. Shih has published some 150 articles in scientific journals and has been awarded both the Swedlow Award and the George Irwin Medal by the American Society for Testing and Materials, according to his biography on the National University of Singapore's Web site.
Shih's former colleagues remember him as a genial professor. "He was a very outgoing, social guy. Very good with his students," said Allan Bower, professor of engineering. Bower, who worked on a joint paper with Shih, called him a "very active researcher."
Janet Blume, associate professor of engineering, who spent nearly a decade working with Shih, said, "He was excellent here." She described Shih as "wonderfully unassuming" and "down to earth," so humble that she was surprised when he took the "enormously huge" job as the president of the National University of Singapore.
Blume also praised Shih's devotion to his students and reports that she and Shih keep in touch. "He's a great guy," she said.
