Nobel Prize Chinese Americans Winners 

Samuel Chao Chung Ting

Date of Birth:	January 27, 1936
Place of Birth:	Ann Arbor, MI.
Went to China:	two month old
Back to the U.S.	1956
U.S. Citizenship:	By birth
Received Ph.D.:	1962
Nobel Prize:	1976 in Physics

	Dr. Ting won his Nobel Prize for his discovery of a new class of massive, long-life mesons he called the J-particle (also known as the psi-particle), in an experiment using the synchrotron at the Brookheven National Laboratory, Long Island, NY.   The discovery of this particle, thought to be composed of a charmed quark and its anti-quark, led to a significant expansion and refinement of the quark model. 

	Honors: the E. O. Lawrence Award,  the U.S. government, 1976;  the Eringen Medal, Society of Engineering Science, 1977;  the Golden Leopard Award,  the town of Taormina, Italy, 1988; the Degasperi Award in Science, the Italian government, 1988; and the Gold Medal for Science and Peace, Brescia, Italy, 1988;  a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Italian Physical Society, and the European Physical Society;  elected as a foreign member in Academia Sinica, the Pakistan Academy of Science, and the Academy of Science of former USSR (now Russian Academy of Science);  Doctor Honors Cause degree from University of Michigan, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Columbia University, University of Bologna (Italy), Moscow State University (Russia), and University of Science and Technology (China); and an honorary professor at Jiaotong University in Shanghai, China.

	Chao Chung Ting was the first of three children of his parents. His father, Kuan Hai Ting, was a professor of engineering, and his mother, Tsun-ying Wang, a professor of psychology.  He was born while his parents were visiting in the United States.  Two month later, he went with his parents to China.  Due to wartime conditions, he did not have a formal education until he was 12 years old. Since his parents were university professors, he met many famous  scholars who cam to visit his parents.   

He later wrote: "Perhaps because of this early influence, I have always had the desire to be associated with university life."  When he was young, he often heard stories from his mother and grandmother recalling the difficult lives they had and efforts they made to provide his mother with a good education.   He said: " I attribute my success today to my mother. She was a remarkable woman. She was intelligent and capable.  She taught in university and served in government.  She believes that no matter which area you choose to work, be the best.  I have been cherishing my mother's conviction, and striving to build myself in the field of physics."   In 1948, the family settled in Taichung, Taiwan, China.   He entered Cheng Kung University in Tainan 1955.  One year later in 1956, at the age of twenty, he decided to return to the United States for a better education.   He arrived at Detroit Airport on September 6, 1956 with only 100 U.S. dollars.  He worked hard to keep his scholarship, and completed degrees in both mathematics and physics from University of Michigan in three years, and completed his Ph.D. degree in physics under Drs. L.W. Jones and M.L. Perl in 1962.

	In 1963, Dr. Ting became a Ford Foundation Fellow at the Center European de la Recherche Nucleaire (CERN) at Geneva, Switzerland.  He taught physics at Columbia University from 1964 to 1967.  By 1965, he was promoted to an associate professor.   In 1966, he had a research group at Deutsche Elecktronen-Synchrotron in Hamburg, West Germany.  In 1967, he became an associate professor in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and in 1969 was promoted to a full professor.  Dr. Ting became a program consultant of the Division of Particles and Fields of the American Physical Society in 1970.  He joined the physics Department of MIT in 1969.  In 1976, he won the Nobel Prize in physics, and in 1977, he was appointed as the first Thomas Dudley Cabot Institute Professor of Physics at MIT.