IAS Senior Member

Professor Ping Sheng received his BS in physics from the California Institute of Technology and PhD in physics from Princeton University. He served as the Head of Department of Physics at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology from 1999 to 2008 and is currently the Dr. William M W Mong Chair Professor of Nanoscience, 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 was awarded the Rolf Landauer Medal by the ETOPIM Society in 2018.  Professor Sheng was elected to be a member of the Hong Kong Academy of Sciences in 2019, and in 2020 was given the title of Honorary Member and Fellow of the Hong Kong Physical Society.  Professor Sheng has published over 450 refereed journal publications and presented over 290 keynote or invited talks at international meetings and conferences. He also has 28 patents and is the author of a monograph on Wave Scattering, Localization, and Mesoscopic Phenomena (Springer, 2006).  

Professor 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 Corporate Research Center from 1979-1994, Professor 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 the HKUST in 1994, 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, Professor 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.  

Professor Sheng has served as a member of the Executive Editorial Board, Solid State Communications; a divisional associate editor of Physical Review Letters; an editorial board member of the New Journal of Physics, the Proceedings of Royal Society A, the SIAM Journal of Mathematics: Multiscale Modeling, Analysis and Simulations, as well as advisory board member of the Research Center for Applied Sciences, Academia Sinica. He is currently a senior fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study, HKUST, a visiting Chair Professor of the National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan.  He has also served as a national board member of Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics, China, and as a member of consulting committees to various universities in China and Taiwan.

Condensed matter physics: hydrodynamic boundary conditions, ultrasound tunneling and focusing through phononic crystals, superconductivity in 4-angstrom single-walled carbon nanotubes, negative dynamic mass density and locally resonant sonic materials, electro-and magnetorheological fluids, generic wave characteristics in heterogeneous materials, composites and porous media, liquid crystals, nano materials, soft condensed matter physics, and wave functional materials.

• "Group Velocity in Strongly Scattering Media", J. Page, Ping Sheng, H. Schriemer, I. Jones, X. Jing and D. Weitz, Science 271, 634 (1996).

• "Fluctuation-Induced Tunneling Conduction in Disordered Materials", Ping Sheng, Phys. Rev. B 21, 2180 (1980).