Wang Yifang (; born February 1963 in

Jiangsu Jiangsu (; ; pinyin: Jiāngsū, alternatively romanized as Kiangsu or Chiangsu) is an eastern coastal province of the People's Republic of China. It is one of the leading provinces in finance, education, technology, and tourism, with it ...

) is a Chinese particle and accelerator

physicist A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate cau ...

. He is director of the

Institute of High Energy Physics The Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IHEP) () is the largest and most comprehensive fundamental research center of high-energy physics in China. It is located in Shijingshan District, Beijing and administered ...

(IHEP) of the

Chinese Academy of Sciences The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS); ), known by Academia Sinica in English until the 1980s, is the national academy of the People's Republic of China for natural sciences. It has historical origins in the Academia Sinica during the Republi ...

Beijing } Beijing ( ; ; ), Chinese postal romanization, alternatively romanized as Peking ( ), is the Capital city, capital of the China, People's Republic of China. It is the center of power and development of the country. Beijing is the world's Li ...

and known for contributions to

neutrino A neutrino ( ; denoted by the Greek letter ) is a fermion (an elementary particle with spin of ) that interacts only via the weak interaction and gravity. The neutrino is so named because it is electrically neutral and because its rest mass ...

physics, in particular his leading role (with Kam-Biu Luk) at Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment to determine the last unknown neutrino mixing angle θ 13 (see

). After earning his bachelor's degree in physics at

Nanjing University Nanjing University (NJU; ) is a national public research university in Nanjing, Jiangsu. It is a member of C9 League and a Class A Double First Class University designated by the Chinese central government. NJU has two main campuses: the Xian ...

(1984) he was with Samuel CC Ting at the

L3 experiment The L3 experiment was one of the four large detectors on the Large Electron–Positron Collider (LEP). The detector was designed to look for the physics of the Standard Model and beyond. It started up in 1989 and stopped taking data in November ...

the

Large Electron-Positron Collider Large means of great size. Large may also refer to: Mathematics * Arbitrarily large, a phrase in mathematics * Large cardinal, a property of certain transfinite numbers * Large category, a category with a proper class of objects and morphisms ...

(LEP) of

CERN The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in a northwestern suburb of Gen ...

. Wang worked and studied at the

University of Florence The University of Florence (Italian: ''Università degli Studi di Firenze'', UniFI) is an Italian public research university located in Florence, Italy. It comprises 12 schools and has around 50,000 students enrolled. History The first universi ...

obtaining PhD in Physics, then worked at Laboratory for Nuclear Science of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is conside ...

and joined the Institute of High Energy Physics(IHEP), China in 2001 as a researcher and became the Director in 2011.

Awards and honors

Panofsky Prize The Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle Physics is an annual prize of the American Physical Society. It is given to recognize and encourage outstanding achievements in experimental particle physics, and is open to scientists of any nation. It w ...

(shared with Kam-Biu Luk) in 2014 *

Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics The Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics is one of the Breakthrough Prizes, awarded by the Breakthrough Prize Board. Initially named Fundamental Physics Prize, it was founded in July 2012 by Russia-born Israeli entrepreneur, venture c ...

in 2016, with Kam-Biu Luk. *Member of

in 2015. *Member of

The World Academy of Sciences The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) is a merit-based science academy established for developing countries, uniting 1,000 scientists in some 70 countries. Its principal aim is to promote scientific capacity and excellence for sustainable deve ...

in 2016. *2019

Future Science Prize The future is the time after the past and present. Its arrival is considered inevitable due to the existence of time and the laws of physics. Due to the apparent nature of reality and the unavoidability of the future, everything that currently ...

*2022

Fellow of the American Physical Society The American Physical Society honors members with the designation ''Fellow'' for having made significant accomplishments to the field of physics Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its mot ...

Since 2014 Wang has been Director of the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) in Southern China leading the experiment in an effect to determine the neutrino mass hierarchy with neutrinos from nuclear reactors.

References

1963 births Living people Members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Foreign Members of the Russian Academy of Sciences Fellows of the American Physical Society Physicists from Jiangsu Scientists from Nanjing TWAS fellows Winners of the Panofsky Prize Winners of the Nikkei Asia Prize People associated with CERN {{China-scientist-stub