I just returned from another trip to China visiting several universities and companies in Beijing and Chengdu to talk about EDI CON and Microwave Journal/Microwave Journal China.  The highlight of my visit was to the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC) in Chengdu where we had the honor and privilege of attending the celebration of the establishment of the Lin Weigan Fund of UESTC which coincided with Lin Weigan’s 93rd birthday.  Our publisher in China, Adonis Mak, and I attended the committee meeting that discussed the details of the fund establishment and how the funds will be awarded to students around the country.  Microwave Journal made a donation to the fund along with several other companies and universities.  The fund will make awards to outstanding achievements and significant innovation in the field of electromagnetic and microwave technology to young engineers and scientists, student paper competitions at international conferences and outstanding graduate work in the field.

After the meeting, we attended the dinner event in honor of Lin Weigan with many prestigious deans and professors from various universities from all over China along with the president of UESTC.  We enjoyed talking with the deans and professors representing some of the top universities in China.  Lin Weigan was there in person (still looking very good at 93 years old) along with his son, Lin Yiyu, who is a professor at Guilin University of Electronic Technology in Winnipeg, Canada.  His son told us how Lin Weigan used to cut out interesting Microwave Journal articles and sent them to Lin Yiyu along with his ideas based on the articles for new design techniques and theories.  It is very rewarding to know that Microwave Journal was used as a reference for one of the great scientific minds in China.

Lin Weigan is considered to be the “father of microwaves” in China from his enormous contributions to the field.  He is one of the pioneers and founders of the science of electromagnetic wave theory and microwave technology in China. His main scientific achievements are in the closed field theory, the open field theory and the image field theory. In the open field problems he has made contributions in the methods of calculations of characteristic impedance of transmission lines, parallel plates of unequal finite width and wave guides filled with inhomogeneous medium. In the image theory in electrostatics, he discovered that a point charge in front of a dielectric sphere creates double images just as a point charge in front of a plane dielectric boundary does. Lin Weigan has published over 100 papers in well known journals and received the Nature Science Award third-class, the National Science and Technology Progress Award third-class, the National Education Commission Awards first- and the second-class and National Teaching Excellency Awards top class.  He worked in the field for more than 60 years.

In addition to UESTC (Chengdu), we also visited other top universities including Tsinghua University (Beijing), Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing Institute of Technology and Sichuan University (Chengdu).  It is nice to know that microwave technology is a key subject studied around the world and China is a key contributor to our field.