Our Members

Prof Ping SHENG

Elected as Member of ASHK in 2019

B.S., California Institute of Technology, Ph.D., Princeton University
Member, The Hong Kong Academy of Sciences

Brief Introduction


Dr William M W Mong Professor Nanoscience

Chair Professor of Physics, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Prof Ping Sheng received his BS in physics from the California Institute of Technology and PhD in physics from Princeton University. Prior to joining the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) in 1994, Prof Sheng was a technical staff at the RCA Laboratories from 1973 to 1979, and a senior technical staff at Exxon Corporate Research Center from 1979 to 1994, during which he served as the head of theory group for a period of three years. Prof Sheng was the Head of Department of Physics at HKUST from 1999 to 2008, and is currently the Dr. William M W Mong Chair Professor of Nanoscience and Chair Professor of Physics.  He is also 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 is awarded the Rolf Landauer Medal by the ETOPIM Society in 2018. Prof Sheng has published over 375 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). 

Prof 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, Prof Sheng's interest broadened into wave interaction and scattering in disordered systems, and porous media. The study of nanotechnology became his focus after joining the HKUST in 1994, where he paid efforts in the discovery of superconducting behavior in ultrathin carbon nanotubes and the giant electrorheological effect. He led the invention of locally resonant sonic materials that initiated the field of acoustic metamaterials. Prof Sheng and his collaborators also 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. 

Prof Sheng has served as Executive Editorial Board member of Solid State Communications. He has also served on the editorial boards of New Journal of Physics, Journal of Royal Society A, SIAM Journal on Multiscale Modeling and Simulation. He has been on the advisory board of the Research Center for Applied Sciences, Academia Sinica and served as a national board member of Kavli Institute of Theoretical Physics, China. He has also served as an associate division editor of Physical Review Letters. He is currently a Senior Fellow of the HKUST Jockey Club Institute for Advanced Study, and is a Visiting Chair Professor of the National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan.

Research Areas: Condensed matter physics in general; particular topics include: acoustic metamaterials, hydrodynamic boundary conditions, ultrasound tunneling and focusing through phononic crystals, superconductivity in carbon sub-nanostructures, electro-and magnetorheological fluids, generic wave characteristics in heterogeneous materials, composites and porous media, liquid crystals.


Website of Prof Ping Sheng at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

December 2021

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