Qufu Normal University in east China's Shandong Province held a special ceremony to welcome Nobel laureate Samuel Chao Chung Ting, a Chinese-American physicist, as its honorary president in Rizhao City on Saturday. 

Song Huanxin, secretary of the university’s Communist Party of China committee, conferred a certificate of appointment at the function, presided over by Tian Dequan, university president.

Ting was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan on January 27, 1936 and graduated from Michigan University in 1959. He got his MSc in 1960 and a PhD in 1962. In 1963, he started work at the European Organization of Nuclear Research in Geneva with a subsidy from the Ford Foundation.

He taught physics at Columbia University, New York from 1964 and was an assistant professor from 1965 to 1967. During that time he headed a research group at Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron in what was then West Germany.

In 1967 he began working as an associate professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, becoming a full professor in 1969. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1976, and has been a professor at the Thomas Dudley Cabot Institute since 1977.

He was elected as the first foreign academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in June 1994. In 1996, he was given the China International Science and Technology Cooperation Award.

(Xinhua News Agency June 20, 2005)