Samuel Chao Chung Ting is an American physicist of Chinese ethnicity who won the Nobel Prize for his discovery of ‘J’ particle. His parents, who were university professors in China, had come to the U.S. on a visit, intending to return home before his birth. But he was born premature and thus became an American citizen by accident. Soon after that, the Tings went back to China, where they stayed until he was twelve and then shifted to Taiwan. When Ting turned twenty, he moved to the U.S with $100 in hand and little or no knowledge of English. Here he managed to enroll at University of Michigan on full scholarship. After receiving his PhD, he began his career as a Ford Foundation Fellow at CERN in Geneva and then taught for few years at Columbia University. His work, which earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics, was started at DESY, Hamburg, but was concluded at Brookhaven National Laboratory, New York City. Concurrently, he worked as a professor at MIT. Mounting of Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer on the International Space Station is another feather in his cap; the project was completed entirely under his direction.
