Ho-kwang Mao

Ho - kwang Mao, called Dave, (born 18 June 1941 in Shanghai) is a native of China American geoscientists. He is known for the development of high pressure with diamond anvil cells and thus simulated conditions that prevail within the Earth for mineralogical investigations. He was the first to reach with diamond anvil cells pressures above 1 megabar.

His father was Mao Sen, Lieutenant General and intelligence officer of Chiang Kai- shek. Mao moved seven years with his family to Taiwan and studied at the National Taiwan University with a bachelor 's degree in 1963. Afterwards he went to the USA to the University of Rochester, where he in 1966 his master's degree made ​​and received his doctorate in 1968. Then he went to the Geophysics Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution in Washington DC, where he remained for the rest of his career.

With Russell J. Hemley, he gradually expanded the print area of the diamond anvil cell up to pressures in the Earth's core (about 1986 reached) and above, and examined closely the behavior of hydrogen at high pressures.

In 1990 he received the Arthur L. Day Prize, 2007 Inge Lehmann Medal of the American Geophysical Union, 2005, the Roebling Medal of the Mineralogical Society of America and the 2005 Balzan Prize ( with Russell J. Hemley ) and the Gregori Aminoff Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1993 ), the Academia Sinica (1994 ), the Royal Society (2008) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences ( 1996). He is a Fellow of the Geochemical Society, the American Physical Society, the American Geophysical Union, Mineralogical Society of America.