Peter K. Dai

CEEAA Distinguished Alumni Award, 2024

For distinguished leadership of major space and defense programs, and research contributing to structural engineering for spacecraft and protective construction. Dr. Dai was the first to develop a general computer program for structural analysis of spacecraft systems and developed advanced expandable structure concepts for the protection of spacecraft. Dr. Dai held leadership roles in support of U.S. national defense. Upon retirement, he became the Director of the National Space Program Office of Taiwan, where he initiated the ROCSAT satellite R&D. He established the Peter Dai Graduate Fellowship in the department and was a mentor to several civil and structural engineers in the areas of missile and space systems engineering. 

Biography

Dr. Peter Dai was born in Shanhgai, China on December 14, 1934, three years before the Sino-Japan War, formally started on July 7, 1937. His father passed in September 1936. His mother, a registered nurse, raised the family of three children: Peter, sister Vina, and older brother Paul. Peter finished Junior High at Trinity College, a British school in Foochow, China, in the summer of 1948. His Senior High year was interrupted by the Chinese Civil War that ended in October 1949. He continued his Senior High in Taiwan in the summer of 1949. He then went to Tainan Engineering College in Taiwan (later named National Cheng Kung University), and earned a BS degree in Civil Engineering in June 1957. In 1959, Dr. Dai was awarded a Graduate Fellowship from the University of Illinois Graduate School of Engineering to study civil engineering. He earned his PhD in 1963.

Dr. Dai worked at the Air Force Materials Laboratory, USAF at Wright Patterson AFB as a research engineer from 1936 to 1965. He collaborated with George Hahn and Al Rosenfield of Battelle Memorial Institute on metal fracture, jointly publishing a paper at the International Conference on Metal Fracture at Sendai Japan in October 1965. He then joined TRW Systems to develop a general computer program for structural stress analysis of space systems. He was then assigned several classified projects. In 1970, he started work related to the IBCM Weapon Systems project. He grew within the IBCM Basing community until 1990 when he was Deputy Program Manager for Peacekeeper(MX) Missile Basing. He was then assigned to assist in the international marketing development of the space program in Taiwan. He retired from TRW in 1992. He became Director of Taiwan National Space Program in 1992, and was responsible for starting up Taiwan’s National Space program. He retired in 1997 and continued to work in Taiwan as a senior advisor for several large-scale, national projects.