Samuel C.C. Ting is the Thomas Dudley Cabot professor of physics at MIT. An MIT faculty member since 1969, he is also the principal investigator for the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer project, a particle physics experiment module that was installed on the International Space Station in early 2011. In 1974, while leading a research team at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, Professor Ting discovered the J Particle (a new kind of heavy elementary particle), work that led to the 1976 Nobel Prize in physics (shared with Burton Richter). Professor Ting holds two degrees from the University of Michigan: a BA in mathematics and physics and a PhD in physics.