Daniel C. Tsui

Daniel Tsui was born in a remote Chinese village to illiterate parents who were determined that their children would be educated. His sent him to Hong Kong, away from war-torn China. Many Chinese scholars had fled there and young Tsui benefited from the glut of overqualified teachers. He received a scholarship to Augustana College in Rock Island, Ill., his pastor's alma mater. For graduate work he went to the University of Chicago. He went on to do research in solid state physics at Bell Laboratories and then to teach at Princeton. He and two others shared the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering that electrons acting together in strong magnetic fields can form new types of particles.