Samuel C. C. Ting

About Samuel C. C. Ting

Who is it?: Physicist
Birth Day: January 27, 1936
Birth Place: Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States, United States
Birth Sign: Aquarius
Native name: 丁肇中 (Dīng Zhàozhōng)
Citizenship: United States Republic of China
Alma mater: University of Michigan
Known for: Discovery of the J/ψ particle
Spouse(s): Kay Kuhne, Susan Carol Marks
Children: 3
Awards: Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award (1975) Nobel Prize for Physics (1976) Eringen Medal (1977) De Gasperi Award (1988),
Fields: Physics
Institutions: CERN Columbia University Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Doctoral advisor: L.W. Jones, M.L. Perl
Website: Samuel Ting

Samuel C. C. Ting Net Worth

Samuel C. C. Ting was born on January 27, 1936 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States, United States, is Physicist. Samuel Chao Chung Ting is an American physicist of Chinese ethnicity who won the Nobel Prize for his discovery of ‘J’ particle. His parents, who were university professors in China, had come to the U.S. on a visit, intending to return home before his birth. But he was born premature and thus became an American citizen by accident. Soon after that, the Tings went back to China, where they stayed until he was twelve and then shifted to Taiwan. When Ting turned twenty, he moved to the U.S with $100 in hand and little or no knowledge of English. Here he managed to enroll at University of Michigan on full scholarship. After receiving his PhD, he began his career as a Ford Foundation Fellow at CERN in Geneva and then taught for few years at Columbia University. His work, which earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics, was started at DESY, Hamburg, but was concluded at Brookhaven National Laboratory, New York City. Concurrently, he worked as a professor at MIT. Mounting of Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer on the International Space Station is another feather in his cap; the project was completed entirely under his direction.
Samuel C. C. Ting is a member of Scientists

💰 Net worth: Under Review

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Biography/Timeline

1936

Samuel Ting was born on January 27, 1936, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States. His parents, Kuan-hai Ting (丁觀海) and Tsun-ying Jeanne Wang (王雋英), met and married as graduate students at the University of Michigan. His parents were from Rizhao County (日照縣), Shandong province, China.

1948

Ting's parents returned to Rizhao two months after his birth. Due to the Japanese invasion, his education was disrupted, and he was mostly home-schooled by his parents. Because of the Chinese Civil War, his parents escaped to Taiwan and started to teach engineering at National Taiwan University. From 1948, Ting attended Chien Kuo Middle school and Taiwan Provincial Engineering College (now National Cheng Kung University), but he completed his college studies in the US.

1956

In 1956, Ting was invited to attend the University of Michigan. There, he studied engineering, mathematics, and physics. In 1959, he was awarded BAs in both mathematics and physics, and in 1962, he earned a doctorate in physics. In 1963, he worked at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). From 1965, he taught at Columbia University and worked at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) in Germany. Since 1969, Ting has been a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Ting is a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and a foreign academician of Academia Sinica.

1960

In 1960 Ting married Kay Kuhne, and together they had two daughters, Jeanne Ting Chowning and Amy Ting. In 1985 he married Dr. Susan Carol Marks, and they had one son, Christopher.

1976

In 1976, Ting was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, which he shared with Burton Richter of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, for the discovery of the J/ψ meson nuclear particle. They were chosen for the award, in the words of the Nobel committee, "for their pioneering work in the discovery of a heavy elementary particle of a new kind." The discovery was made in 1974 when Ting was heading a research team at MIT exploring new regimes of high Energy particle physics.

1995

In 1995, not long after the cancellation of the Superconducting Super Collider project had severely reduced the possibilities for experimental high-energy physics on Earth, Ting proposed the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a space-borne cosmic-ray detector. The proposal was accepted and he became the principal investigator and has been directing the development since then. A prototype, AMS-01, was flown and tested on Space Shuttle mission STS-91 in 1998. The main mission, AMS-02, was then planned for launch by the Shuttle and mounting on the International Space Station.

2011

This project is a massive $1.5 billion undertaking involving 500 Scientists from 56 institutions and 16 countries. After the 2003 Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, NASA announced that the Shuttle was to be retired by 2010 and that AMS-02 was not on the manifest of any of the remaining Shuttle flights. Dr. Ting was forced to (successfully) lobby the United States Congress and the public to secure an additional Shuttle FLIGHT dedicated to this project. Also during this time, Ting had to deal with numerous technical problems in fabricating and qualifying the large, extremely sensitive and delicate detector module for space. AMS-02 was successfully launched on Shuttle mission STS-134 on 16 May 2011 and was installed on the International Space Station on 19 May 2011.