Syd S. Peng

Syd S. Peng received his undergraduate diploma in mining engineering from National Taipei University of Technology in Taiwan. He went to the United States in 1965 for advanced study and received his Ph.D. in mining engineering from Stanford University in 1970. From 1970 to 1974, he worked for the U.S. Bureau of Mines, Twin Cities Research Center, in charge of rock physics research. He joined West Virginia University in 1974. In 1978, he was appointed as chairman of the Mining Engineering Department, a position he held until September 2006. He served again as interim chair in 2015. He retired from WVU in 2013. In 1985, he established the Longwall Mining and Ground Control Research Center and assumed its directorship. In 1998, he was appointed director of Coal and Energy Research Bureau, State of West Virginia. He has supervised more than 100 research projects with more than $12 million from government and private sources. He has performed research in more than 300 mines in coal and industrial minerals in all U.S. mineral producing states and 16 foreign countries. He has successfully supervised 39 Ph.D. dissertations and 47 M.S. theses. He established the annual international conference on ground control in mining in Morgantown, West Virginia, in 1981 and served as its proceeding's editor and co-editor until 2010. The conference has become the annual forum for world-wide experts on ground control in mining and spun off a similar conference in China since 2014. He has written several textbooks and published more than 380 conference proceedings and journal papers in the areas of longwall mining, ground control, surface subsidence, respirable dust, modeling and mine seals. His research emphasized both theory and practice, i.e., theory is validated with mining practice and mining practice is based on sound theory.