Dr. Ji received his Ph.D. in nuclear theory in 1987 from Drexel University. After postdoctoral appointments at Caltech and MIT, he served as assistant professor at the Center for Theoretical Physics at MIT from 1991 to 1996. Since 1996, he has served as professor of physics at the University of Maryland, where he currently is Distinguished University Professor. He also served as Dean of Physics at Shanghai Jiao Tong University from 2009-2014.

Dr. Ji’s theoretical physics research area is Quantum Chromodynamics, the fundamental theory of strong interactions, and the structure of the proton.

Since 2009, he has built and lead an experimental group in China, the PandaX collaboration, searching for a form of dark matter particles, WIMPs, using liquid xenon technology. In 2016 and 2017, PandaX obtained the world’s most sensitive detection results, which were selected as one of the “Highlights” of the American Physics Society in 2017.

Dr. Ji has been a Fellow of the American Physical Society since 2000. His honors and awards include the Humboldt Research Award in 2014, the Distinguished Nuclear Physicist award by the Jefferson Science Association in 2015, and the Herman Feshbach Prize in Theoretical Nuclear Physics from the American Physics Society in 2016. He is a member of the Committee for the Future Science Prize in China since 2017, and served as its chair in 2019.