After earning his PhD at Berkeley, Lay Nam Chang was a resident associate at MIT from 1967 to 1969. He next held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Enrico Fermi Institute of the University of Chicago from 1969 to 1971.
He moved to Virginia Tech in 1978 and rose from associate (1978–83) to full professor (post-1983). During his tenure at Virginia Tech, he was a visiting scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory (1981), Stony Brook University (1982, 1984), Brookhaven National Laboratory (1980), and the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara (1988).[8] For several years he served as chair of the Physics Department at Virginia Tech. From 2002 to 2003, he served as the last dean of Virginia Tech’s College of Arts and Science, which, following a restructuring, split into a College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, and a College of Science.[4]
In 2003, Lay Nam Chang became first dean of Virginia Tech’s newly formed College of Science and filled that role until his retirement in 2016. He held responsibility for eight departments, established a new School of Neuroscience, and initiated interdisciplinary programs including the Virginia Tech Academy of Integrated Science, which fosters research across fields such as computational analytics and data modeling, nanoscience, and systems biology.[9]
Lay Nam Chang continued to publish research articles in theoretical physics during his years as a dean. In 2005, he published a study called, "Hydrogen-Atom Spectrum under a Minimal-Length Hypothesis," with Sandor Benczik, Djordje Minic, and Tatsu Takeuchi;[10] while in 2013, he wrote an article with Zachary Lewis, Djordje Minic, and Tatsu Takeuchi entitled, “Is Quantum Gravity a Super-Quantum Theory?”[11]
Students at Virginia Tech remembered him, among other things, for taking science- and non-science majors to visit CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland, on a study abroad tour, and for introducing new specialized and interdisciplinary undergraduate programs in subjects like nanomedicine, polymer chemistry, and medicinal chemistry.[12]
To honor Lay Nam Chang’s service, Virginia Tech established an endowed chair, called the Lay Nam Chang Dean’s Chair. This position provides its holder with funds to initiate new programs as dean of the College of Science. Upon establishing this position, the head of the Roundtable – Virginia Tech’s advisory board of alumni and friends – called Chang a “visionary” for his work in promoting neuroscience within the university, while Virginia Tech’s official news bureau described a college dean’s chair like this one “the most prestigious position that can be held” within one of the institution’s constituent colleges.[9]
The statistician Sally C. Morton became the first recipient of the Lay Nam Dean’s Chair in the College of Science at Virginia Tech in 2016.[9]
References
^Collins, G.B.; Chang, L.N.; Ficenec, J.R., eds. (1981). Weak Interactions as Probes of Unification. New York: American Institute of Physics.
^Chang, Lay Nam (1967). Constraints on Strong Interaction Amplitudes Imposed by PCAC (Partially Conserved Axial-Vector Currents) and Current Algebra. PhD Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.
^American Men & Women of Science: A Biographical Dictionary of Today's Leaders in Physical, Biological, and Related Sciences (2008). Lay Nam Chang. Gale.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
