Dr. Ping Sheng is a distinguished scholar and pioneering figure in the field of condensed matter physics with transformative contributions to materials science. He currently serves as a Senior Member of the Institute for Advanced Study and Professor Emeritus at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology following his tenure as the Dr. William M W Mong Chair Professor of Nanoscience. With a robust academic foundation he earned his BS in physics from the California Institute of Technology and completed his PhD in physics from Princeton University. Prior to his distinguished career at HKUST Dr. Sheng spent fifteen years at Exxon Corporate Research Center where he developed expertise in wave interaction and scattering in disordered systems. His transition to HKUST in 1994 marked the beginning of a transformative period in his research career during which he served as Head of the Department of Physics from 1999 to 2008.
Dr. Sheng's groundbreaking research has fundamentally reshaped understanding across multiple domains of materials physics and acoustics. He pioneered the study of liquid crystal-substrate interaction during his time at RCA David Sarnoff Research Laboratory and established critical mechanisms of charging-energy correlated hopping and fluctuation-induced tunneling conduction in disordered materials. At HKUST his team made seminal discoveries including superconducting behavior in ultrathin carbon nanotubes and the giant electrorheological effect in nanoparticle suspensions. Most notably he is recognized as the conceptual initiator and leader of the field of acoustic metamaterials inventing locally resonant sonic materials that break the mass density law in shielding low frequency sound. His 450 plus refereed journal publications including 56 in Physical Review Letters and 4 each in Science and Nature Materials have accumulated over 58 000 citations with an H-index of 106 demonstrating profound and sustained impact across the scientific community.
Beyond his direct research contributions Dr. Sheng has been instrumental in translating scientific discovery into practical innovation with his former students and postdocs founding Acoustic Metamaterials Group in 2014 to commercialize his breakthroughs. He has received numerous prestigious honors including the Technology Leader of the Year award from Sing Tao Group the 2013 Brillouin Medal the 2018 Rolf Landauer Medal and election to the Hong Kong Academy of Sciences in 2019. His theoretical framework applying Onsager's principle of minimum energy dissipation to derive hydrodynamic boundary conditions resolved the classical problem of moving contact line in two phase immiscible flows demonstrating his continued capacity for fundamental insights. As a Senior Member of the Institute for Advanced Study and Associate of Clare Hall Cambridge University since October 2023 Dr. Sheng continues to shape the future of materials science through mentorship and collaboration. His ongoing research on the physics of wave interactions in complex media promises to yield further breakthroughs that will advance both fundamental understanding and practical applications in materials science.
