Ping Sheng

Prof. Sheng Ping received his BS in physics from the California Institute of Technology and PhD in physics from Princeton University. Having worked at Exxon Corporate Research Center for 15 years, he joined the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 1994, and served as the Head of Department of Physics from 1999 to 2008. He had been the Dr William M W Mong Chair Professor of Nanoscience at HKUST until June 2022 before being appointed as IAS Senior Member.

Prof. Sheng’s research is in the area of condensed matter physics. He has pioneered the study of liquid crystal-substrate interaction while at the RCA David Sarnoff Research Laboratory, and established the mechanisms of charging-energy correlated hopping and fluctuation-induced tunneling conduction in disordered materials. While at Exxon, Prof. Sheng’s interest broadened into wave interaction and scattering in disordered systems, and porous media. The study of nanotechnology became his main focus after joining HKUST, where he led the efforts in the discovery of superconducting behavior in ultrathin carbon nanotubes, and the giant electrorheological effect in suspensions of nanoparticles. He is also the inventor of locally resonant sonic materials that can break the mass density law in shielding low frequency sound. More recently, Prof. Sheng and his colleagues resolved the classical problem of moving contact line in two phase immiscible flows, by applying Onsager’s principle of minimum energy dissipation to the derivation of hydrodynamic boundary conditions.

Prof. Sheng has published over 410 refereed journal publications and presented over 290 keynotes or invited talks at international meetings and conferences. He has been a member of the Executive Editorial Board of Solid State Communications; an editor of the New Journal of Physics, a division associate editor of Physical Review Letters until 2016, a national board member of Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics, China, as well as a member of consulting committees to various universities in China and Taiwan. He also has 28 patents and is the author of a monograph on Wave Scattering, Localization, and Mesoscopic Phenomena (Springer, 2006). He was a visiting Chair Professor at the National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan, as well as an advisory board member of the Research Center for Applied Sciences, Academia Sinica. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, and a Member of the Asia Pacific Academy of Materials. In 2002, he was awarded Technology Leader of the Year by the Sing Tao Group. He is the 2013 Brillouin Medal winner for his seminal contribution to locally resonant acoustic metamaterials, and the 2018 winner of the Landauer Medal from the international ETOPIM Society. Prof. Sheng was elected a Member of the Hong Kong Academy of Sciences in 2019 and was elected as PSHK Honorary Member in 2020 “for his groundbreaking discoveries and exploration of acoustic metamaterials, soft matter and fluid dynamics; and for his dedication to promoting interdisciplinary and collaborative research in Hong Kong”, and as PSHK fellow in 2020 “for his seminal contributions to a large number of diverse physics problems and outstanding services to the academia of Hong Kong and Greater China."