CHINESE-AMERICAN physicist Tsung-Dao Lee, a Nobel laureate renowned for his contributions to high-energy physics and his role in advancing China’s science education, passed away in the United States early yesterday morning at the age of 97. Shanghai Jiao Tong University, where Lee held an honorary professorship, confirmed his death in an obituary released yesterday afternoon. Born in Shanghai in November 1926, Lee attended universities in the provinces of Zhejiang and Yunnan before obtaining a doctoral degree at the University of Chicago in the U.S. in 1950. In 1953, he began teaching at Columbia University in the City of New York until his retirement in 2012 as a University Professor and Enrico Fermi Professor of Physics. Lee was best known for his work with Chen Ning Yang, another renowned Chinese physicist who now lives on the campus of Tsinghua University in Beijing, for their investigation into the so-called parity laws. The research earned them the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics. In addition to his cutting-edge research outcomes, Lee was deeply respected for his efforts in cultivating Chinese science talents and contributing to the development of the study of physics in China. Since the early 1970s, he frequently traveled to China to give lectures and provide suggestions on China’s science education, frontier research in high-energy physics, high-quality talent cultivation and China’s scientific cooperation with other countries. He helped establish a number of academic programs for gifted youth and college students in China to foster talents and promote Chinese researchers’ communication with the U.S. and other developed countries. He also played an important role in advocating for the establishment of the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the China-U.S. joint committee on high energy physics, as well as the construction of several high-end large science facilities, which spearheads China’s innovative research in basic science and paves the way for China’s breakthrough discoveries in high energy physics. Yan Ning, founding president of the Shenzhen Medical Academy of Research and Translation, said yesteray afternoon on her social media account that the death of Lee is “the fall of a giant star.” ?(China Daily) | 