Samuel Chao Chung Ting

Although born in the U.S. while his parents were visiting, Ting returned to China when he was two months old and remained there until he was 20. It took him three years to get degrees in math and physics from the University of Michigan. While teaching at Columbia University he became involved with electron-positron pair production experiments. After a few years of experimentation in Germany, he went to the Brookhaven National Laboratory where his team found evidence of a new heavy particle—the J particle. For his work, he shared the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physics with Burton Richter, who, working independently from Ting, discovered a similar particle.