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Asian American Engineer of the Year Awards
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Distinguished Science and Technology Award
Taylor G. Wang
Centennial Professor and Director
Center for Microgravity Research and Applied Physics
Vanderbilt University
Astronaut, Payload Specialist
NASA
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Centennial Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Physics, Vanderbilt University. Director, Center for Microgravity Research and Applications, Vanderbilt University
Born in Nanchang, China in 1940, Dr. Taylor Wang moved with his family to Taiwan in 1952, where he completed elementary and high school. He studied physics at UCLA from 1963 and received BS degree in 1967, MS in 1968 and doctoral in solid-state physics and in fluid mechanics in 1971.
After graduation, Dr. Wang worked until 1988 in the California Institute of Technology’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He gained US citizenship in 1975. His publication on the dynamic behavior of rotating spheroids in zero gravity in 1976 received attention in NASA, and Dr. Wang had then been undergoing training as an astronaut-scientist since June 1, 1983 in Spacelab-3. On April 29, 1985, Dr. Wang, as a payload specialist, went on Challenger with six others on the Space Shuttle Challenger during mission STS-51-B for seven days, 8 minutes, and 46 seconds. During the flight, Dr. Wang observed the behavior of the spheroids in the Drop Dynamics Module. For this contribution, October 11, 1985 was the Taylor G. Wang Recognition Day in Washington, D.C. Dr. Wang is the first ethnic Chinese astronaut to go into space.
Dr. Wang joined Vanderbilt University, Tennessee as a Centennial Professor in 1988. He has written about 180 articles and developed 8 patents on drop and bubble dynamics, collision and coalescence of drops, charged drop dynamics, containerless science, and encapsulation of living cells. His experiments were carried out in summer of 1992 in United States Microgravity Laboratory 1 (USML-1), and in fall of 1995 aboard USML-2. He has been in the editorial board of E Biomed Journal, a member of the International Pancreas & Islet Transplant Association, a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, the president and a board of director of the Association of Space Explorers USA, a member of the American Physical Society, American Institute of Astronautics and Aeronautics, National Research Council Committee on the Space Applications Board and Sigma Xi, a board of director of the Committee of 100, and a member of the Physics Advisory Council, UCLA.
The Awards he received include Certification of Appreciation from World Vision, Group Achievement Award, Llewellyn J. Evans Award, Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal, Space Flight Medal from NASA, Educational Award from Vanderbilt University Alumni League, Certification of Appreciation from the Minority Engineering Research Program, and the Asian Pacific American Achievement Award. He was the Featured Asian American in Weber Costello/Fahy Williams Publishing Inc. and in Martin Marietta’s poster series of Asian Americans in Science and Technology. He was invited to address the United Nations’ General Assembly as part of the “Only One Earth Day” and Asian Pacific American Heritage Month Proclamation Signing Ceremony with President George Bush.
Dr. Wang is married to Xueping Feng with two sons, Kenneth Wang and Eric Wang.
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