“Abbott still sells the steerable cardiac ablation catheters we developed over 20 years ago!”
Standing outside his former company, Raymond Chia spoke with unmistakable pride.
He and three cofounders turned a small lab into a 60,000-square-foot facility making 100,000 catheters a year to help doctors worldwide map cardiac signals and treat irregular rhythms.
From nuclear power plant, offshore platforms, and oil drill bits to cardiac catheters, the Irvine biomedical founder applied mechanics to new challenges, learning focus, responsibility, and trade-offs.
After handing over the reins, he embraced family time, books, and travel.
Crossing Seas, Inheriting Wisdom
In 1947, two-year-old Raymond Chia left Wuhan with his mother to join his father in Taiwan, settling in Tainan.
His second-oldest brother stayed behind in mainland China. What seemed a brief separation lasted years.
Only later did Chia understand how deeply history had shaped his family’s fate.
Raymond Chia with his parents and two older brothers.
His warmest memories of Tainan are the seminary’s red walls, neighborhood snacks, and parks along his walk to school. Learning ran in the family.
His grandfather, an imperial examination scholar, ran a traditional school. His father knew the toil of farmwork before becoming a teacher and studying at Tokyo’s Hosei University.
His mother, a former elementary teacher, knew the Chinese classics well. His father always sought her review of his writing.
Loving and thoughtful, gentle yet firm, she taught her children by example.
Reading High, Studying Late
In third grade, Chia moved to Hualien when his father’s job at the government monopoly bureau took the family there.
Assigned to a class of unwanted students, he remembers joy: desks pushed aside for games, teacher sometimes joining in. Through play, he found his own way to learn.
He often climbed the school’s banyan trees to read. He still remembers their fruit and the faint bitterness of their leaves.
Logs near home offered another discovery: bark that tasted like cinnamon. To see something was to want to try it.
In secondary school, his father stressed English. At dawn, Chia walked along field ridges to the seawall and recited vocabulary aloud to the ocean.
Playful and sometimes distracted in class, he could also be stubbornly focused.
One night, when his father turned off the light, he refused to leave his desk until it came back on. Only after finishing his homework did he go to bed.
From that struggling class, he advanced to Hualien High School, ranked second in his graduating class, and earned recommendation-based admission to National Taiwan University (NTU).
Raymond Chia (back row, sixth from left) with his Hualien High School classmates.
He credits luck: strong performances by earlier graduates had earned his school a second admission slot that year.
His father hoped he would study medicine. But a classmate’s older brother had entered NTU’s civil engineering program, and Chia was impressed.
He followed that path through a master’s degree.
Inspiring Mentors, Expanding Horizons
Three professors broadened Chia’s outlook in NTU’s civil engineering graduate program. He admired Kuan-Hai Ting’s open, clear teaching.
Summer visitors included continuum mechanics scholar Chao-Cheng Wang and future biomechanics pioneer Yuan-Cheng Fung.
Fung’s path from civil engineering to aeronautics and life sciences revealed something lasting: mechanics could explain the human body as well as structures.
That insight may have planted the seed for Chia’s eventual move into cardiac medicine.
Modest Means, Distant Dreams
In 1970, Chia left for Rice University in Houston on a full scholarship to pursue a doctorate in mechanical engineering.
After airfare, he had $300 left. Southern accents initially left him guessing in lectures, but his NTU training helped him finish in under four years.
Raymond Chia and his wife at his Rice Ph.D. graduation.
His dissertation examined rock under intense underground heat and pressure. How did fluid seepage affect it? Would a borehole collapse?
When conventional analysis fell short, he turned to the Finite Element Analysis (FEA), dividing complex rock formations into small elements to calculate stress and deformation.
Breaking problems into manageable parts would carry him across industries.
His first job involved analyzing how nuclear plants and offshore platforms responded to earthquakes and giant waves. He worked up to 70 hours a week.
When a chemical plant proposed tying several towers together to limit swaying, his calculations revealed a danger: rigid connections could cause damage as temperatures changed. He recommended allowing movement while maintaining support.
Drilling Deeper, Breaking Through
In 1976, California drill-bit manufacturer Smith International sought research talent through Rice’s mechanical engineering department.
Its chairman was a Rice alumnus. A professor recommended Chia.
Why him? He laughs and credits a holiday card. “Maybe the professor had just seen the card I sent!”
Still, he felt unprepared. “I’d never even seen a real drill bit.” Unfamiliar with the factory, he said little during his visit.
Mistaking his silence for disinterest, a vice president assured him there was no pressure. Suddenly, Chia realized: “They really wanted to hire me!”
His early reports read like academic papers. He learned to fit them on one page: conclusion, reasoning, then action.
He also examined used bits to trace wear. Designs that worked on a computer faced their real test underground.
Smith was then facing a patent lawsuit from rival Hughes Tool over drill-bit seals. These small parts kept grease in and drilling mud out; failure shortened a bit’s life.
Combining solid and fluid mechanics, Chia used computer simulations to replace parallel contact surfaces with an angled design, helping Smith navigate the patent dispute.
He also developed new bits with the materials team, earning four patents. Synthetic diamond bits eventually accounted for 14% of Smith’s total sales.
As a Chinese immigrant, Chia earned trust but also encountered suspicion.
Before responding to a remark, he weighed whether it reflected humor, envy, or malice. Credentials opened doors; results secured his place.
Chia’s standout work at Smith International earned him a spot in its product catalog.
While he was back in Taiwan mourning his mother, tunnel construction near Qingshui Cliff on the North-Link Railway stalled.
The “Big John” boring machine was stuck, and the Veterans Engineering Administration sought Smith’s help.
Alerted by the company, Chia collected rock samples for triaxial testing at NTU.
After analyzing their strength and failure behavior, he recommended drilling and blasting with support installed in stages, helping work resume.
Changing Careers, Choosing Family
Promotion brought problems no computer could solve. As business conditions shifted, Smith ordered proportional layoffs across departments.
Chia knew how hard his colleagues worked but could not change the decision. Research offered possible solutions; personnel decisions left him feeling powerless.
R&D head Raymond Chia (front row, center) with colleagues.
Then Smith decided to move its operational center to Houston. His family had roots in California: the children were growing up, and his wife had built her career there.
He chose to stay and seek a new path.
After applying to five companies and receiving four offers, he joined Pfizer subsidiary Shiley in 1989. It was closest to home and offered a new field: cardiac devices.
Drill bits and hearts seemed worlds apart, yet shared fundamental questions. How much force could materials withstand?
How would parts deform? How would fluids flow?
His experience with rock and drilling now informed his work on heart valves and blood flow. Medicine also gave him more common ground with his wife, an ophthalmologist.
Hearing Clues, Protecting Hearts
Shiley’s signature Björk–Shiley artificial heart valve worked like a one-way door, opening and closing to direct blood flow.
In some models, fractured support struts endangered patients and prompted family lawsuits.
Chia helped investigate whether differences in vibration could distinguish intact structures from damaged ones.
He visited national laboratories and sought precision instruments in Germany. Related research also explored imaging.
X-ray images and sounds inside the body were faint and complex, requiring repeated testing.
Even when abnormalities were detected, patients, families, and physicians still had to weigh the risks of another operation.
The structures and materials in his calculations now carried lives—and families’ hopes.
Pooling Resources, Pursuing Dreams
At a management workshop, an instructor asked participants to imagine their lives in ten years. Chia wrote down family travel and owning a company.
A vague ambition began taking shape.
In 1994, he left Shiley. He and three partners each invested $20,000 to establish Irvine Biomedical Inc. (IBI), developing catheters to diagnose and treat arrhythmias.
Their shared expertise and hopes filled a lab smaller than 1,000 square feet.
Raymond Chia with company CEO Peter Chen.
The four PhDs brought strengths in electrical engineering, regulation, marketing, and mechanical design.
Electrophysiology catheters appealed to them because they were small enough to prototype and test themselves.
Chia requested material samples from suppliers and began building. Within two months, the team produced its first prototype: the IBI-1000, a nonsteerable quadripolar electrophysiology catheter.
It received FDA 510(k) clearance and went on sale the following year. Steerable 20-electrode diagnostic catheters and catheters to treat fibrillation followed.
Chia later developed steerable 20-pole diagnostic catheters and catheters to treat atrial fibrillation, earning 33 patents
Reaching Farther, Building Together
Electrophysiology catheters sense the heart’s electrical signals, helping doctors locate abnormalities.
At the American Heart Association’s annual scientific meeting, the young company’s pioneering 14-electrode sensing capability drew attention—and immediate interest from potential investors.
Soon, slender catheters were leaving Irvine for hospitals across the United States, Europe, Japan, and China.
Japanese distributor Getz Bros. accounted for 40% of sales.
Most distributors brought back clinical feedback that improved products; some accepted shipments but never paid.
As the team grew to about 300, cash flow and delivery pressures mounted. The researcher had to become a business leader.
Many production workers were recent immigrants from Little Saigon, so dedicated they needed reminders to take breaks.
During shipping crunches, they urged Chia to go home while they stayed late to finish orders. Their commitment still moves him and his fellow shareholders.
He made that shared purpose company policy. Following larger companies’ practices, he gave every employee—including cleaning staff—stock options.
“I see everyone as my partner. That’s why we call them associates, not employees.” He extended the same trust to suppliers and distributors, inviting some distributors to invest.
Raymond Chia (far left) brought employees and families together over barbecues.
“Without them, this company would never have made it.” Behind every catheter were careful hands, patients awaiting care, and families counting on a livelihood.
Reading Signals, Passing Leadership
As IBI grew, competition intensified. Chia considered acquisitions, partnerships, and going public.
Then rival St. Jude Medical acquired Getz Bros., IBI’s largest Japanese distributor, prompting him to reassess.
In 2004, after securing continued employment for staff and fair returns for shareholders, he sold IBI to St. Jude Medical, which Abbott later acquired in 2017.
He stayed through early 2007 to guide the transition.
During the handover, he continued leading work on localization and atrial fibrillation treatment using intracardiac ultrasound.
The team built prototypes and conducted animal studies, but significant hurdles remained between detection and treatment.
He had learned to commit fully—and to let others carry the work forward.
Staying Focused, Cherishing Time
Looking back, Chia claims no secret to success. His advice to young people is simple: stay focused.
“Focus is like a needle—it can pierce anything. Aiming too high and spreading yourself too thin gets you nowhere.” Find work you love and give it your full attention.
When problems arise, return to fundamentals and work through them. Use AI, he advises, but understand the question and exercise your own judgment.
Focus carried him through challenges. Choosing what to relinquish showed him whom his remaining time belonged to.
Once, after dropping his young granddaughter at school, he turned back and saw her quietly crying. That reluctance to part stays with him. “Life requires trade-offs. You can’t have everything.”
After handing over the company, he welcomed requests for advice but declined invitations to start again. He chose family, books, and travel.
Wherever he goes, he still asks how places rose and fell—as curious as the boy reading in a banyan tree.
Years earlier, he had written down two dreams: build a company and travel with his family. He achieved the first with his partners.
Now he has time for the second.
Even while building his business, Chia made time for family trips.
Inside the factory, a team turned ideas into catheters that traveled the world. Outside it, Chia made more room for those closest to him.
From drilling into rock to protecting hearts, he devoted his life to solving problems.
Today, when his family needs him, he is there. That, too, is an answer.