AWARDEE OF ASTRONOMY SCIENCES PRIZE

FANG CHENG

Professor Fang Cheng, an astrophysician, was born in Kunming,Yunnan Province. He graduated from Nanjing University in 1959, and since then he has been working as a teacher in the Department of Astronomy, Nanjing University. He was elected the academician of Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1995.
As a visiting scientist, he engaged in the research of solar physics at Paris Observatory from 1980 to 1982. He was successively served as a special member and the director of the Center of Astronomy and Astrophysics in the China Center of Advanced Science and Technology, the director of the Department of Astronomy of Nanjing University, the president of the Chinese Astronomical Society, the head of the astronomical appraisal group of the Mathematics and Physics Section in NSFC.He was elected the vice-president of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in 2003, and is currently one of the editors-in-chief of the Chinese Journal of Astronomy and Astrophysics, the vice-president of the Scientific Committee of Nanjing University.
 Professor Fang was in charge of the design and the construction of the Solar Tower Telescopeof Nanjing University.The telescope was built in 1980, and as the only one of its kind in China, has been successfully put into operation. With successive improvement, including the establishment of a multi-wavelength 2D imaging spectral system, a lot of valuable spectral data of solar active phenomena have been obtained during more than twenty years.
Using non-LTE theory, he and his collaborators have successfully developed a set of practical methodsand programsand achieved important results: a series of semi-empirical atmospheric models of solar active phenomena, such as solar flares, sunspots, plages and prominences etc., have been obtained; the method for the diagnostics of non-thermal particles in flares has been proposed; the asymmetry of line profiles and the velocity field in solar flareshave been well explained by the chromospheric condensation;the dynamic models of flares have been deduced. He and his colleagues proposed for the first time the magnetic reconnection in the solar lower atmosphere as a mechanism of the type II white light flares and Ellerman Bombs. They also provided a new model to explain the EIT waves discovered recently by solar satellites, and it has been widely accepted in the world.
He has won several national and ministerial major scientific research achievement awards, including one second-place National Science and Technology Advanced Award, one third-place National Natural Science Award,and two first-place Science and Technology Awards by the Ministry of Education of China.