Ou Chin-der

Who is Ou Chin-der?

Ou Chin-der is a Taiwanese civil engineer. Ou was an immigrant who moved from the mainland China to the Taitung County of eastern Taiwan with his parents. He graduated and received his master's degree of civil engineering from National Cheng Kung University, and took a doctoral degree in Soil Mechanics at Case Western Reserve University.

Ou became an official of the government of Republic of China, Taiwan in the late 1980s. He served as the director of Taiwan's National Expressway Engineering Bureau from 1990–1995, and the chairman of Public Construction Commission of Executive Yuan, the central government of Taiwan, from 1996 to 1998. Ou took part in several key public projects, such as the Sun Yat-sen Freeway, the No. 2 Northern Freeway and the Taipei-Yilan Freeway.

Later Ou transited to act as the political deputy mayor of Taipei City between 1998 and 2004. He gained public recognition and wide popularity for his effort during the 1999 Chichi earthquake and SARS outbreak, and has since became the leading expert of crisis management in Taiwan.

Ou left his post as the deputy mayor of Taipei on August, 2004 and became the chairman of Taipei City Government owned Taipei Smart Card Corporation, a company which operates the EasyCard contactless smartcard system for use on the Taipei MRT. During his term, Ou successfully pushed the sales of EasyCard over 6 million in just a few years.