Chinese scholars laud UCI scientist

Saturday, June 5, 2004

by Gary Robbins

Jonathan Feng, a theoretical particle physicist at the University of California, Irvine, has received the Overseas Chinese Physicists Association's Outstanding Young Researcher Award. The group confers the award each year on a physicist of Chinese origin who works outside of Asia. Feng, 37, explores many questions in astrophysics, including whether Earth has only four dimensions and the composition of dark matter. Feng made a splash last year by helping discover a class of cosmic particles known as superweakly interacting massive particles, or superWIMPS. Scientists are studying whether superWIMPS represent unseen cosmic matter that could comprise 25 percent of the mass in the universe.