Shoei-Sheng Chen, or S.-S. or more affectionately “Sunshine” as he was commonly known to his close friends and colleagues, was born in Ko-Lin Village in Dong-Shan County of I-Lan, Taiwan. He was the first in his town to attend high school and eventually graduated at the top of the class in engineering at the National Taiwan University and was awarded a scholarship to study in the U.S. He received his Ph.D. at Princeton University in 1968. After that he took a job as a civil and mechanical engineer at the Argonne National Laboratory in Darien, Illinois—a position he held for 30 years until his retirement in 1998. S.-S. met his wife Ruth in the U.S. They were married in 1969 and settled down in Willowbrook, Illinois, with their three children Lyrice, Lisa, and Steve.
Throughout his career at Argonne, S.-S. was a prolific researcher in the field of flow-induced vibration and fluid–structure interaction. He pioneered the highly complex area of analytical formulation of tube bundle fluid–elastic instability and earned numerous awards and recognitions for his publications. In 1987, he published the book “Flow-Induced Vibration of Circular Cylindrical Structures,” which has since become a classic treatise in this field.
In addition to his research activities at Argonne, S.-S. was very active in professional societies. He was, for example, a Fellow of The American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the Chair of the Technical Committee on Fluid–Structure Interaction in the ASME Pressure Vessel and Piping (PVP) Division from 1987 to 1991. From 1991 to 1995, he served as the Honors and Awards Chair of the Division and in 1995 as the Chair of the PVP Conference in Hawaii. He was the Chair of the PVP Division from 1995 to 1996. For his contribution to ASME and to the engineering profession, S.-S. was awarded the Pressure Vessel and Piping Medal in 2001. In addition, The Division’s Outstanding Service Award now carries his name.
After his retirement from Argonne National Laboratory, S.-S. and Ruth moved to Laguna Niguel in California, where he began the next chapter of his life devoting himself to Christianity, health and natural methods of disease prevention. He served as a deacon in the Chinese Christian Mandarin Church at Laguna Niguel.
In addition to his wife Ruth and three children, S.-S. is survived by five grandchildren: Elizabeth, Jessica, Anna, Claire, and Isaac, with one more grandchild born by the time this message is printed.
