Qian Lingxi (; 26 July 1916 – 20 April 2009), also known as Tsien Ling-hi, was a Chinese civil engineer and physicist. An authority on engineering structural mechanics and computational mechanics, he served as President of the Dalian University of Technology (DUT) and was a founding member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). DUT's Lingxi Library, opened in 2009, is named after him. Early life and education On 26 July 1916, Qian was born in the town of Hongsheng (, now Hongshan Subdistrict) outside the city of Wuxi in Jiangsu, China. His father, Qian Bogui (), was the teacher of the celebrated historian Qian Mu (Ch'ien Mu), and his older brother Qian Linzhao (1906–1999) was also a distinguished physicist and a founding member of the CAS. After obtaining his bachelor's degree in civil engineering from Institut Technique Franc-Chinois de Shanghai (now part of the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology) in 1936, he won a Boxer Indemnity Scholarship to study at the Université libre de Bruxelles in Belgium. He received the degree of from the university in July 1938. Career He returned to China in the fall of 1938, in the midst of the Second Sino-Japanese War. He participated in the design of the Yibin-Kunming and Sichuan-Yunnan railways, worked in the Bridge Design and Engineering Department of the Ministry of Communications, and taught at Yunnan University. In November 1943, he became professor of civil engineering at Zhejiang University, then exiled in Zunyi, Guizhou because Zhejiang was under Japanese occupation. After the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Qian became Chair of the Department of Civil Engineering of Zhejiang University in 1950. In January 1952, after repeated invitations from Qu Bochuan, President of Dalian Institute of Technology (now Dalian University of Technology or DUT), Qian agreed to move to Dalian to teach at DUT. He spent the rest of his career there, and succeeded Qu as the second president of the university. In 1955, he became one of the founding members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. During the Cultural Revolution, top experts including Qian Lingxi and Huang Xuhua were denounced as "reactionary academic authorities" and dismissed from their posts. When China's nuclear submarine project needed Qian's help to analyze its structural designs, its leader Chen Youming had to appeal directly to Premier Zhou Enlai to make him available to the strategic program. Contributions Research Qian