UMKC professor receives President’s Award for Sustained Career Excellence

University of Missouri System

April 14, 2017
Award recognizes faculty who exhibit sustained excellence during the course of their career

KANSAS CITY, Mo. –  On behalf of the University of Missouri System, University of Missouri-Kansas City Provost Barbara Bichelmeyer today awarded the ninth of ten UM System President’s Awards to be presented to faculty in 2017 to Curators’ Distinguished Professor of Physics Wai-Yim Ching.

Bichelmeyer—accompanied by Associate Teaching Professor Robert Riggs—surprised Ching in front of his colleagues at a physics faculty meeting with the President’s Award for Sustained Career Excellence, which includes a $5,000 prize. The award recognizes faculty for distinguished, career-long sustained excellence in scholarship, research or creativity, for a period of 15 or more years.

Ching began teaching at UMKC as an assistant professor of physics in 1978. He quickly rose to a tenured associate professor in 1981 and a full professor in 1984. In 1988, he was named to his current role as a Curators’ Distinguished Professor of Physics.

“Professor Ching has served the university and the physics department 38 years and has truly sustained excellence as a researcher and teacher,” nominators Fred Leibsle and Robert Riggs, both from the department of physics, wrote. “Dr. Ching has published refereed publications that are well-received within the scientific community and have been published in top journals in his field. Forty of those publications have been within the last five years, indicating that Dr. Ching is not slowing down.”

Ching’s research and publications cover diverse disciplines, such as condensed matter physics, ceramics and glasses, chemistry, biology, material science, engineering, medical science, geophysics and earth science. He was one of the most cited physicists in the world from 1981 to 1997, with more 2,000 citations of 171 papers. To date, his published research has been cited more than 16,400 times.

“Wai-Yim is almost consumed by physics research, typically working seven days a week. In those rare years when he takes a family vacation, he spends much ...

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