Founding Members

Prof Ching W Tang was born in Yuen Long, Hong Kong in 1947. He received his secondary school education in Hong Kong at Yuen Long Public Middle School and King’s College. In 1967 he left Hong Kong to pursue his undergraduate education in the University of British Columbia (UBC) where he obtained a B.S. with first-class honors in Chemistry. After graduating from UBC in 1970 he went to Cornell University for his graduate studies with Prof Andreas C. Albrecht. He obtained his PhD in 1975 and immediately went to work as a research scientist at the Kodak Research Laboratories (KRL) in Rochester, New York. His research career at KRL spanned 31 years and he was named a KRL Distinguished Fellow in 2003. After retirement from Kodak in 2006, he joined the University of Rochester as the Doris Johns Cherry Professor of Chemical Engineering. He joined the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) in 2013 as the IAS Bank of East Asia Professor at the HKUST Jockey Club Institute for Advanced Study, and has joint appointments with the Departments of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Chemistry and Physics.

Prof Tang’s research interest centers on developing optoelectronic devices based on organic semiconductors. He is best known for the invention of organic light emitting diodes (OLED), which has been successfully commercialized for display and lighting applications. He is also widely recognized for the discovery of organic solar cells based on a novel donor-acceptor heterojunction device structure. This important structure, or subsequent variations of it, has proved to be the key to achieving high device performance and has since been used as the building block in practically all organic optoelectronic devices, including OLED. Prof Tang was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society in 1998, a fellow of the Society for Information Display in 2002, and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 2006. He is a recipient of an honorary doctorate from Shanghai University. His notable awards include  Wolf Prize in Chemistry, Jack Rajchman Prize of the Society for Information Display, Carothers Award of the American Chemical Society, Humboldt Research Award, Daniel E. Noble Award of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Eduard Rhein Award, Nick Holonyak Jr. Award of the Optical Society, IEEE Jun-ich Nishizawa Medal, NEC C&C Prize and Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology. He has been inducted into the US National Inventors Hall of Fame as well.

Website of Prof Ching W Tang at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

December 2021