Chinese Famous Chinese Americans

Taylor Wang Wikipedia

Image:S84-36141.jpg|right|thumb|Taylor Wang - NASA photo (1984)

Taylor Gun-Jin Wang (王贛駿 Pinyin: W?ng G?nj?n) (born June 16, 1940) is the first ethnic Chinese astronaut to go into space. The Chinese American was a payload specialist on the space shuttle Challenger, during mission STS-51-B, on April 29, 1985.

With ancestry in Yancheng (鹽城縣), Jiangsu Province, Wang was born in Shanghai to Wang Zhang (王章) and Yu Jiehong (俞潔虹). He moved to Taiwan in 1952 with his family. He studied his later part of elementary school in Kaohsiung, and middle school in Taipei. He later moved to Hong Kong. He started studying physics in UCLA in 1963, and received his M.S. in 1968, and his doctoral in fluid mechanics in 1968 and solid state physics in 1971.

After graduation, Wang worked until 1988 in the California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He gained US citizenship in 1975, and published a paper on dynamic behavior of rotating spheroids in weightlessness|zero gravity the next year. The paper received attention in NASA, and Wang had then been undergoing training as an astronaut-scientist since June 1, 1983 in Spacelab|Spacelab-3. On April 29, 1985, he went on Challenger with six others for seven days, 8 minutes, and 46 seconds. During the flight, Wang observed the behavior of the spheroids in the Drop Dynamics Module.

Wang later became a professor at Vanderbilt University, Tennessee. He has written about 180 articles on drop and bubble dynamic, 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.

Wang is married to Xueping Feng (馮雪平) with two sons, Kenneth Wang and Eric Wang

See also: Shenzhou 5, which carried People's Republic of China|China's first citizen into space

Last Modified:   2005-02-25