Prize Recipient

Jen-Chieh Peng
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

"For pioneering work on studying antiquark distributions in the nucleons and nuclei using the Drell-Yan process as an experimental tool, and for seminal work on elucidating the origins of the flavor asymmetries of the light-quark sea in the nucleons."

Jen-Chieh Peng grew up in Taiwan and received his B.S. in physics from Tunghai University in 1970. He then received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Pittsburgh under the supervision of James Maher in 1975. Following a postdoctoral research period at Saclay, France, he moved to Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1978, becoming a Laboratory Fellow in 1996. Peng joined the faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as Professor of Physics in 2002. His research interests include the quark and antiquark structure of nucleons and nuclei, fundamental symmetries, and neutrino physics. Peng has conducted experiments at the AGS, LAMPF, Jefferson Laboratory, Fermilab, and CERN. In close collaboration with Joel Moss, Gerry Garvey, Chuck Brown, and others, Peng carried out a series of experiments at Fermilab to probe the antiquark content of the proton and nuclei using the Drell-Yan process. He is a spokesperson or co-spokesperson of some 10 nuclear and particle physics experiments and a coauthor of over 430 journal articles. He has served on the Program Advisory Committees of Jefferson Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, and the Japanese hadron facility (J-PARC). Peng is an Academician of the Academia Sinica, a co-recipient of the 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society.