Maw-Kuen Wu
Maw - Kuen Wu (Chinese吴茂昆, Pinyin Wú Maokun; born December 6, 1949 in Yuli, Hualien County, Republic of China) is an American physicist of Chinese origin.
Wu spent his childhood in Taiwan. He received his PhD in physics in 1981 from the University of Houston and became an assistant professor at the University of Alabama. Later, Wu was professor of physics at Columbia University. From 2004 to 2006, Chairman Wu of the Taiwanese National Science Council, which provides funds for research and director of the Institute of Physics of Academia Sinica (2002-2004, 2006-2012 ).
He is currently president of the National Dong Hwa University.
His research interests are superconductors and cryogenics. Together with Chu Ching -wu, he discovered in 1987 superconductivity in yttrium barium copper oxide about 77 Kelvin .. In the first decade of the new millennium important contributions to a novel class of low-temperature superconductors with extremely high transition temperatures based on FeAs were created under his leadership. For these contributions he was awarded the Nikkei Asia Prize 2011.