Nationality United States Doctoral advisor John Reppy | Name Moses W. Notable students Eunseong Kim | |
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Born November 23, 1946
Xi-an, China (1946-11-23) Alma mater Bridgewater College(BSC), Cornell University(Ph.D.) Known for Research in Low temperature physics, on solid 4He. Notable awards Fritz London Memorial Prize(1996) Education Cornell University (1974), Bridgewater College (1967) Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Natural Sciences, US & Canada Fields Condensed matter physics, Cryogenics | ||
Institutions Penn State University Residence United States of America |
Moses Hung-Wai Chan (陳鴻渭) is a physics professor at Penn State University, where he holds the rank of Evan Pugh Professor. He is an alumnus of Bridgewater College and Cornell University, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1974 and was a Postdoctoral Associate at Duke University. He has been a professor at Penn State's University Park Campus since 1979.

Through the years, professor Chan's work has spanned many diverse topics. For his numerous contributions to low temperature physics, in 1996 he shared the prestigious Fritz London Memorial prize with Carl Wieman and Eric A. Cornell. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2000, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004.
Professor Chan is known for the experimental discovery of evidence for a new supersolid quantum state of matter, predicted theoretically in 1969 by Alexander Andreev and Ilya Liftshitz, and its subsequent refutation. Other significant discoveries include the experimental observation of Critical Casimir effect and the experimental confirmation of 2D Ising model.