Celebrating Asian American, Native Hawai'ian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month: Samuel Ting, first Asian-American recipient of Nobel Prize in Physics

Samuel Chao Chung Ting, born January 27, 1936 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, is the first U.S.-born Asian American to win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1976.  Ting, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, shared the prize with Burton Ricther of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center for the discover of the J/psi nuclear particle. 

In 1995, Ting proposed the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a cosmic ray detector and has been working on its development ever since. A prototype was flown on Space Shuttle Discovery (STS-91) in 1998.  The main mission was scrubbed after the Columbia disaster in 2003.  Dr. Ting successfully lobbied the US Congress to secure a space shuttle flight to carry the AMS-02.  It was launched on Space Shuttle Endeavour (STS-134) and installed on the International Space Station in May 2011.