Wang Yifang

Wang Yifang (Chinese: 王贻芳; born February 1963 in Jiangsu) is a Chinese physicist. He is an elementary particle and accelerator physicist. He is director of the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and known for contributions to neutrino 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 neutrino).[1]

After earning his bachelor's degree in physics at Nanjing University (1984) he was with Samuel CC Ting at the L3 experiment the Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP) of CERN. Wang worked for the University of Florence, Laboratory for Nuclear Science of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and at Stanford University[2] and joined the Institute of High Energy Physics(IHEP), China in 2001 as a researcher and became the Director in 2011.[3]

He was awarded the Panofsky Prize (shared with Kam-Biu Luk) in 2014[3] and the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in 2016, again with Kam-Biu Luk, as the leader of Daya Bay Team of China.[4] He was elected an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2015 and The World Academy of Sciences in 2016.[5]

In 2019 he won the China's Future Science Prize together with Prof. Kam-Biu Luk in discovering a third pattern of neutrino oscillations in experiment. [6]

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.[3]