On April 30th, the National Academy of Sciences of the United States announced the election of 120 new members and 24 foreign members to recognize their sustained and outstanding achievements in original research. Among them, Academician Wang Yifang, director of the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is the only mainland Chinese elected as a foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States.
Wang Yifang. Image provided by the Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Wang Yifang is primarily engaged in high-energy physics research. Leading the Daya Bay Experiment team, he discovered the third neutrino oscillation mode, recognized as one of the top ten scientific breakthroughs of 2012 by the journal "Science" in the United States. He proposed and constructed a new experiment, the Jiangmen Neutrino Experiment (JUNO), to measure the neutrino mass order, developing a novel 20-inch photomultiplier tube for this purpose. He also led the design and development of the Beijing Spectrometer (BESIII) and in 2012, proposed the concept of a circular electron-positron collider, leading the team in scheme design and key technology research.
For his outstanding contributions in the field of particle physics, Wang Yifang has been named one of the "Top Ten National Science and Technology Workers," awarded the National Natural Science First Prize (ranked first), the Future Science Prize, the Panofsky Experimental Particle Physics Prize, and the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. He is also an international academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences and an academician of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World.
