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| Alumni Who Have Made a Difference Nobel Laureate Samuel Ting (BS EP ’59, BS EM ’59, MS ’60, PhD ’63, Hon ScD ’78) didn’t have to look far to find scholarly role models who could fuel his passion for learning: his father was a professor of engineering and his mother a professor of psychology. And he didn’t have to search for an academic institution that would challenge his keen mind; he turned to the University of Michigan or, rather, returned to it.  Samuel Ting was born in Ann Arbor in 1936, while his parents were graduate students at U-M. Later raised in China and Taiwan, his formal schooling was postponed until he was almost 12 because of conditions brought about by the Sino-Japanese War and World War II. In the intervening years, he was home-schooled by his grandmother—a teacher—who assumed child-rearing responsibilities so his parents could pursue their academic careers. “My parents were always associated with universities, and I had the opportunity to meet many accomplished scholars,” Ting recalled. “Because of this early influence, I’ve always had the desire to be associated with university life.” When he was 20, he decided to return to the United States to pursue his education: “I had read that many American students go through college on their own resources, and I informed my parents that I would do likewise.” Ting arrived at the airport in Detroit with $100 in his pocket and the determination to find a way to put himself through the U-M College of Engineering. Anxious about being so far from home, he drew support from his parents’ friend, George Granger Brown—then dean of Engineering—who offered him a place to live. In 1959, after just three years of study, Ting earned degrees in both Engineering Physics and Engineering Mathematics. By 1963, he had completed his doctoral degree in physics through the College of LS&A. Said Lawrence Jones, professor emeritus of physics and co-chair of Ting’s thesis committee: “He was a young man in a hurry.” The next year, Ting was granted a Ford Foundation Fellowship to work at the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland. In 1965, he returned to the U. S. to take a teaching post at Columbia University. During his second year there, he became fascinated with an experiment performed at the Cambridge Electron Accelerator involving electron-positron pair production that seemed to suggest a violation of quantum electrodynamics. That year, he took a leave of absence from Columbia and traveled to the Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron in Hamburg, Germany, to further study this phenomenon. The Hamburg research set him on the path toward international recognition, and—in 1969—he was asked to join the physics faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In the Spring of 1972, he began an experimental program at Long Island’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, searching for certain kinds of nuclear particles that would decay into electron-positron pairs. To do this, he adapted the detector design used in Germany to make it more sensitive to the specific energy signal for the electron-positron pairs—a signal that otherwise would be lost in a flurry of millions of other nuclear collisions and particles. At Brookhaven, Ting also discovered a new subatomic particle he named the ‘J particle,’ the first of a new class of massive, long-lived mesons. While preparing to publish his findings, he happened to share his results with a colleague, Burton Richter, who coincidentally had identified the same particle by an entirely different method. Together, their discovery—called the ‘J/psi particle’—earned them the 1976 Nobel Prize in physics. This new particle was especially interesting to physicists, as it also seemed to confirm the existence of a fourth quark, called ‘charm.’ For all his accomplishments, Ting might be said to lead a ‘charmed’ life in his chosen area of research. Noted Jones of his former student: “He has the talent and mental abilities to be creative; he puts in a lot of hard work; and he had the good fortune—or luck, if you will—to be looking for the right thing at the right time.” Ting—who is now the Thomas Dudley Cabot Institute Professor of Physics at MIT—is currently directing an experiment for the International Space Station in conjunction with NASA and the U. S. Department of Energy. The experiment's purpose is to look for anti-matter originating from outside our galaxy by employing a state-of-the-art particle detector called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer.
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