Dr. Chang explaining his IMP(left) and Nimbus (right) satellite designs for NASA to Rector of Catholic University, Rev. William J. McDonald, in 1963. Courtesy of ACUA

While the Chinese civil war started to wreak havoc in his home country, Dr. Chang began his academic career as an associate professor of Aeronautics at Johns Hopkins University in 1947. After five years in Baltimore, he became a research professor at the University of Maryland in 1952. Meanwhile, he earned a PhD from Caltech in 1950, and was a Guggenheim fellow in the field of Applied Physics in Cambridge and Manchester in the academic year of 1952-1953.

After leaving Maryland in 1954, he spent the next eight years as a professor of Fluid Mechanics at the University of Minnesota, until he was on leave to serve as Head of the Theoretical Mechanics Division and Senior Staff Scientist in Physical Research Laboratory at the Aerospace Corporation from 1962 to 1963. In a 1967 article, Dr. Gabriel D. Boehler of the Catholic Univesity of America briefly introduced Dr. Chang’s career and recalled that Chang “was in June 1963 Director of a very successful Symposium on Plasma Space Sciences which attracted world attention.” The symposium marked the beginning of his career at Catholic University.

In 1963, a fifty-four-year-old Chang arrived at Catholic University and co-founded the Space Science and Applied Physics Department. He had just finished his one-year affiliation as Senior Staff Scientist in the Physical Research Laboratory at the Aerospace Corporation before joining Catholic University. The university valued his expertise and network in the field of Space Science, so much so that he was made “distinguished chair professor” of that field on the spot.

His departmental leadership paralleled “the phenomenal growth of government or industrial aero-space facilities in the Washington area” in the early 1960s and added to the university’s national prestige. By 1967, the department had developed a joint doctoral program with NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and Dr. Chang’s team had attracted two NASA projects to the university. These projects respectively contributed to the development of the Interplanetary Monitoring Platform (IMP) and Nimbus satellites. The former proved instrumental in the Apollo Program, the latter pivotal in the study of our own planet.