“I’ll never forget that moonlight.” In 1959, newly arrived in America to study, Chen-Shui Tsai rode a Greyhound alone from Portland, Oregon, to Logan, Utah.
Moonlight washed over the desert.
Hungry and lonely, he missed his parents in Taiwan. That night, he understood Li Bai: “I look up at the moon, then bow my head and think of home.”
Over six decades later, that homesickness still lingers.
From rural Taiwan, Tsai rose to international prominence in integrated optics and ultrasonic microscopy, becoming a UC Distinguished Professor and Academia Sinica member.
He and his wife, Shirley Tsai, endowed a scholarship fund at their alma mater, National Taiwan University.
He also funded an AI electronics lab at UC Irvine to support the next generation of researchers.
Rural Roots, Quiet Resolve
Chen-Shui Tsai, now 91, grew up in Neihu, a village in Tongxiao, Miaoli County, Taiwan.
He was the third of five children. His father taught school, and his mother stretched the family budget to cover everything from household expenses to tuition.
His father knew how hard it was to get an education and valued every chance his children had to learn.
Quiet and reserved, Tsai listened closely when adults spoke and would speak up if he caught a mistake.
His father, then an elementary school vice principal, told him a new rule allowed fifth graders to take the junior high entrance exam.
Tsai prepared quietly and earned a place at Yuanli Junior High School.
Living with an aunt in town during junior high taught him to fend for himself.
His strong exam scores earned him admission to both Hsinchu Senior High School and Taichung First Senior High School.
Relatives missed his name on the admissions lists and briefly spread word that he had failed.
Once the mix-up was cleared up, he chose Taichung First.
Tsai excelled in class but froze in front of a crowd. In elementary school, he once stayed home because he was afraid of serving as class president.
In junior high, his English teacher, Kao Yu-ho, saw how reluctant he was to draw attention and encouraged him to speak onstage.
When the school chose him for a Mandarin speech contest, Kao prepared his speech and had him rehearse before the staff.
He reached the proverb “When the nest is overturned, no egg stays whole” and read the words for “whole eggs” as “it’s all over.” The room erupted in laughter.
He had yet to learn the character for “egg.”
At Taichung First, an English teacher picked him to represent the school in an interschool English recitation contest.
Too afraid to tell her how nervous he was, he simply stayed away on the day of the contest, embarrassing her.
Years later, after speaking at conferences around the world, he could laugh at the memory.
He still appreciated her faith in him and regretted passing up the chance to practice.
His parents hoped he would study medicine. Tsai believed engineering could help more people, so he put electrical engineering at National Taiwan University first on his application.
His father respected the choice. Tsai’s later decision to teach at a university echoed his father’s lifelong devotion to elementary education.
After graduating in 1957, Tsai passed Taiwan’s higher civil service and telecommunications exams and completed his reserve officer service in Pingtung.
He planned to join Taiwan Power or the telecommunications bureau and support his parents.
But his older brother, Chen-Mu, married and dropped plans to study in Japan.
As classmates left one after another for America, Tsai hurriedly applied to Utah State University.
Tsai is going to study in the United States; relatives and friends took a group photo to see him off!
New Shores, Hard Beginnings
Tsai’s parents borrowed from relatives and friends to send him abroad. Before he left, they gathered for a farewell photo.
As his plane lifted off from Taipei’s Songshan Airport in September 1959, he watched Taiwan recede and couldn’t stop crying.
He had barely thought about how he would make his connections or where he would spend his first night in America.
In Seattle, relatives and friends of Hu Shu-hsien, a fellow student on his flight, gave him a place to stay.
The next day, he boarded a Greyhound with Hu and another student.
During a stop in Portland, they bought food at a nearby market.
Just before departure, the driver split them between two buses. Tsai boarded alone before they could divide the food.
The bus crossed the desert, traveling a day and a night. At a brief stop in Pocatello, Idaho, an American schoolboy struck up a conversation and bought him a chicken lunch.
Tsai still remembers that kindness. He wrote to thank the boy as soon as he reached Logan, but never heard back.
His first act at Utah State was to send his entire $2,400 deposit home to help his father repay the debt.
With no scholarship his first year, he graded papers for professors and dug ditches alongside American students on weekends.
The ground was hard and rocky. Eight hours of digging left him breathless and earned him $8, enough for half a month’s rent.
Whenever he managed to save a little, he walked 45 minutes to the post office to send it home.
Tsai shared a basement apartment with five or six other Taiwanese students, taking turns cooking.
All year, he paid the 10-cent bus fare to campus just once, during a heavy snowfall.
Apples were cheap, so he packed a few with an egg sandwich every day. “For five or six years afterward, I couldn’t face another apple,” he recalled.
There was laughter, too. Students from Taiwan and Hong Kong got together for Christmas, New Year’s, and picnics.
Mentor’s Guidance, Lifelong Gratitude
While pursuing a master’s in electrical engineering at Utah State, Tsai switched from power engineering to electronics and telecommunications.
He worked hard to catch up on the fundamentals.
Department chair Larry Cole saw his potential and recommended him for doctoral study at Stanford.
“He thought I’d have a better future at Stanford,” Tsai said.
Tsai never forgot what Cole did for him. He named his son Larry after him and funded a scholarship in Cole’s name for more than 40 years.
In 2025, he endowed the scholarship at Utah State so it could continue supporting students.
Three times, Tsai took his family back to Logan to visit the Coles and other former teachers.
He also hosted the Coles at his Irvine home, where former students and their spouses gathered to see their old professor again.
Stanford Training, Independent Research
Tsai entered Stanford’s electrical engineering Ph.D. program in June 1961.
He spent his first Christmas and New Year’s break preparing for the qualifying exam, unwinding each day with classical music in a classmate’s room.
The second movement of Dvořák’s New World Symphony always made him homesick.
He placed 19th out of 250 on the exam, making Cole proud of his former Utah State student.
On the day Tsai graduated with his master's degree in 1961, he posed for a photo with his mentor, Professor Larry Cole, and his wife, Lucy, in front of the professor's house.
Tsai’s adviser went on leave twice and, with little time to supervise him, suggested he find someone else.
Tsai took the commitment seriously and stayed. Working through problems on his own taught him how to do independent research.
After earning his doctorate in 1965, he stayed in Northern California, working as a researcher and technical consultant at the Lockheed Palo Alto Research Center and teaching at San José State University.
He found his calling in university teaching and research.
First Letters, Lasting Love
In June 1966, Tsai went to a meeting at Caltech on behalf of his supervisor, Dr. Hans.
There he finally met Shirley Tsai, his pen pal of two years. She, too, came from Taiwan and was pursuing a doctorate in chemistry at Caltech.
They fell in love at first sight and felt as if they’d known each other for years.
That December, more than 100 people attended their engagement celebration at Stanford’s Chinese Students Club.
Their close friend Shu-chen Hsu arranged flowers for them, and General Yun Chen, whom Tsai admired, stood in for Shirley’s parents and wrote a traditional blessing on a plaque.
They married in Stanford’s historic Memorial Church in late September 1967, with more than 300 guests.
After the ceremony, they served Chinese refreshments.
Tsai worked and taught in Northern California while Shirley continued her doctorate in Southern California.
She considered leaving school so they could live together. He encouraged her to finish.
Shirley earned her Ph.D. in chemistry from Caltech in 1969. That same year, Tsai joined Carnegie Mellon University, and the couple moved to Pittsburgh, finally able to live together.
After they had children, Tsai encouraged Shirley to return to work and shared school pickups, shopping, and cleaning.
Whoever got home first started dinner, and some afternoons the children did homework in his office until he was ready to take them home.
Professor Tsai and his wife, along with their children, grandchildren, son-in-law, and daughter-in-law, returned to Taiwan to visit the old house.
Pioneering Research, Global Recognition
Tsai started as an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Carnegie Mellon.
The boy who had skipped a recitation contest now had to teach classes, explain his ideas to peers, and lead a research team.
He became associate professor in two years and full professor two years later, only the second scholar in the university’s 70-year history to reach full professor in four years.
In 1980, with unanimous support from the department’s senior faculty, he was appointed to the Westinghouse Endowed Chair.
Tsai was grateful that senior colleagues had given a young scholar from Asia room to pursue his own research. He later gave his students the same trust.
After 11 years at Carnegie Mellon, Tsai moved his family to Southern California in July 1980 and joined UC Irvine as a senior professor of electrical engineering.
His ties to the university now span 46 years.
He secured major government funding in his first year and, within two, built his lab into one of the world’s leading centers for integrated optics.
Professor Tsai (center) received the President's Chair Professorship from the President of UCI (right)!
Tsai served as acting chair of electrical engineering in 1985–86 and reached UC’s Above-Scale rank in 1991.
In 1993, he won the Taiwanese-American Foundation’s Science and Technology Award.
It became his most prized honor—driven by his deep admiration for founders Kenjohn and Jacqueline Wang’s motto: "Give back to the society that made you."
Tsai (fifth from right) was awarded the Taiwan-US Foundation Science and Technology Engineering Achievement Award.
In 1994, Tsai received a distinguished academic award. His public lecture, “Photons: Express Messengers on the Information Superhighway,” drew more than 300 people.
In 2018, he was named a UC Distinguished Professor.
Tsai published more than 280 papers across integrated optics, acoustic microscopy, atomization, microdroplet ejection, and microwave magnetics.
He and Shirley co-invented several devices. A Northern European company is evaluating whether to commercialize one of their atomization technologies.
His work in acoustic microscopy uses sound waves to probe materials that light cannot easily penetrate.
Under the right conditions, the technique can detect internal cracks and delamination without cutting the material open.
Tsai received several international honors, taking particular pride in the IEEE Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control Society’s Achievement Award, its highest honor for research.
He also lectured in Europe, China, Japan, and what was then the Soviet Union.
Rigorous Mentorship, Enduring Ties
Tsai brought the same rigor to mentoring that he brought to research.
He advised 40 doctoral students, reading every dissertation line by line and guiding it through repeated revisions.
By the time students left his lab, he wanted them to know how to frame their own questions, test their methods, and work independently.
Tsai kept close ties with Taiwan. While at Carnegie Mellon, he returned by invitation for Taiwan’s first National Development Conference.
He later led a delegation that held Taiwan’s first large-scale optoelectronics workshop and urged universities to establish interdisciplinary centers for industrial technology research.
At Carnegie Mellon, he advised Taiwanese doctoral students. After graduation, some went into university teaching and others joined research institutes or tech companies.
Tsai and Shirley treated students like family. They brought gifts when students married and, at the couples’ request, sometimes officiated. Former students kept coming back to visit.
In 1999, Academia Sinica President Yuan T. Lee invited Tsai back to Taiwan as founding director of the Institute of Applied Sciences and Engineering Research. Shirley went with him.
He recruited researchers from universities, organized international symposia, and oversaw funding, staffing, and research priorities.
The institute became the Research Center for Applied Sciences in 2004, and Tsai returned to speak about its founding.
At an anniversary celebration in early July 2026, center director Pei-Kuen Wei and his colleagues planted trees in Tsai’s honor.
Speaking Up, Moving Forward
After decades in academia, Tsai advises young people to start by knowing themselves.
“Everyone has a talent.” Once you find work you enjoy and do well, he says, give yourself time to get somewhere.
“A lot of people give up just before they succeed.” Sometimes the breakthrough is one step away.
“When you have an idea, speak up.” Early in his career, Tsai would rehearse a sentence in English in his head during academic discussions.
By the time he was ready to speak, the conversation had moved on.
He learned that everyday fluency would only take him so far. In academic discussions, he had to practice explaining his ideas clearly on the spot.
He urges young scholars to put as much care into writing and speaking English as they do into developing their expertise.
Family Sacrifice, Lasting Legacy
“My parents never got to spend even one day with us in America.” It remains Tsai’s deepest regret.
A medical exam kept his father from getting a U.S. visa.
Whenever Tsai and Shirley returned to Taiwan, they brought their children and grandchildren to the old family home in Neihu and gathered with his parents, relatives, and friends.
His parents never saw for themselves the life he had built abroad.
Tsai’s father Kuo-liang Tsai devoted his life to education. He cared for his parents and his mother-in-law and doted on his children.
Generous with relatives and friends, he spent little on himself. Around Tongxiao and Yuanli, people called him “Saint Tsai Kuo-liang.”
When his father turned 80, Tsai brought the whole family back to Taiwan. Thousands came to celebrate, filling more than 250 banquet tables.
What delighted his father most was seeing his children and grandchildren together.
In June 2026, Tsai and Shirley returned to their alma mater, National Taiwan University, and gave $1 million to establish a fund for outstanding students and visiting international scholars.
NTU President Wen-Chang Chen led the ceremony, with the couple’s children and grandchildren there to witness it.
Tsai’s parents had once borrowed money to send him abroad. Now he and Shirley were giving another generation a chance to study.
Across the Pacific, Tsai also gave about $1.3 million to establish an AI electronics lab at UC Irvine.
There, students will use AI to design, simulate, and fabricate devices, testing their ideas sooner.
The lab’s opening ceremony is scheduled for January 2027 in the engineering school courtyard.
“I’ve spent half my life here.” At the university where he once built a lab of his own, Tsai is making room for a new generation of researchers.
More than six decades ago, under a desert moon in the American West, a hungry student missed his parents and wondered where the journey would take him.
Looking back, Tsai remembers who helped him along the way: the parents who sent him, the mentor who guided him, the colleagues who gave him a chance, the wife who shared the journey, and the students who trusted him.
Through his gifts, Tsai is passing on the opportunities others gave him. He hopes the young people who get their start this way will someday give someone else a chance, too.