Weng Cho Chew

Weng Cho Chew (born 1953) is a Malaysian-American electrical engineer and applied physicist known for contributions to wave physics, especially computational electromagnetics.

He is a Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University.

Born in Malaysia, Chew received his bachelor's, master's and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1976, 1978 and 1980, respectively.

Following his doctoral studies, Chew joined Schlumberger-Doll Research in 1981 where he rose to the rank of department manager.

In 1985, he accepted a position at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he was director of the electromagnetics lab from 1995 to 2007.

Chew is the author of Waves and Fields in Inhomogeneous Media (Van Nostrand Reinhold 1990; reprinted by IEEE Press, 1995), the co-author of Integral Equation Methods for Electromagnetic and Elastic Waves (Morgan & Claypool, 2008), and co-editor of Fast and Efficient Algorithms in Computational Electromagnetics (Artech House, 2001).

Chew was named an ISI Highly Cited Researcher in 2001 and he is an honorary professor at Tsinghua University, China, honorary professor at National Taiwan University, Taipei, and a distinguished visiting scholar at The University of Hong Kong.

From 2007 to 2011, Chew served as dean of engineering at the University of Hong Kong.

Chew was elected Member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2013, “for contributions to large-scale computational electromagnetics of complex structures.” He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) (1993), the Optical Society of America (2003), the Institute of Physics (2004), the Electromagnetics Academy (2007) and the Hong Kong Institution of Engineers (2009).

In 2017, Chew joined the school of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University.

Chew's chief contributions are in the areas of waves in inhomogeneous media for various geophysical subsurface sensing and non-destructive testing applications, integrated circuits, microstrip antenna applications, fast and efficient algorithms for solving wave scattering and radiation problems, stretched coordinate perfectly matched layers, and inverse scattering using distorted Born approximation.

Chew has developed fast solvers that make it possible to simulate the electromagnetic behavior of structures of unprecedented sizes.

Specifically, his group had the first working multilevel fast multipole algorithm (MLFMA) that when adopted by other groups, subsequently helped increase the size of solvable problems by six orders of magnitude.

More recently, Chew has turned his attention toward combining quantum theory with electromagnetics, as well as combining computational electromagnetics with differential geometry.

He has also recently derived quantum Maxwell's equations directly in coordinate space.

Chew received the IEEE Electromagnetics Award in 2017, the Applied Computation Electromagnetics Society Award in Computational Electromagnetics in 2015, and the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society Chen-To Tai Distinguished Educator Award in 2008, “[f]or outstanding contributions to education in the fields of electromagnetic theory and computational electromagnetics.” He also received the Sergei A. Schelkunoff Best Paper Award from IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation (with Jun-Sheng Zhao) in 2001, the Campus Wide Excellence in Professional and Graduate Teaching Award from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2001, and the IEEE Leon K. Kirchmayer Graduate Teaching Award in 2000, among other recognitions.

In 2018, Chew served as President of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society.

He is editor-in-chief of Progress in Electromagnetic Research and previously was editor-in-chief of the Journal of Electromagnetic Waves and Applications.

He has helped organize the PIERS meetings around the world.

Notable students or postdoctoral researchers of Chew include: Qing Huo Liu (Duke University), Mahta Moghaddam (University of Southern California), Fernando Teixeira (Ohio State University), Kaladhar Radhakrishnan (Intel), Lijun Jiang (Chinese University of Hong Kong), Phil Atkins (KLA Tencor), Jiming Song (Iowa State University), and Karl Warnick (Brigham Young University).