Born in a mud house in a remote and largely illiterate village in China, he was awarded a scholarship funded as a result of the Boxer Rebellion of the late 19th century to attend Beijing's prestigious Tsinghua University.

In addition, he obtained the first theoretically calculated value for the electron affinity spectrum of the hydrogen atom, a problem of fundamental significance in quantum mechanics and astrophysics.

In 1972, following Richard Nixon's visit to China, Jen led a ground-breaking delegation of Chinese American scientists to that country.

C K Jen was born on October 2, 1906, in Hexi Village on the west bank of the Qin River in Shanxi Province in northern China.

Shanxi Province is part of the Yellow River Valley which served as the "cradle of Chinese civilization," but by the time of Jen's birth, was a largely arid region populated by poor farmers struggling with overworked soil and periodic flooding.

Over the next eight years of bombing, deprivation and hardship, Jen persisted in his theoretical and experimental radio research as well as in his physics teaching responsibilities.

His students during this period included future Nobel Prize winners C. N. Yang and T. D. Lee, and other distinguished researchers such as Chen-To Tai.

At the end of World War II, he returned to the United States on sabbatical leave at Harvard and turned his research focus to microwave spectroscopy.

His work in this area was influenced by senior colleagues at Harvard including John Van Vleck, Charles Townes, Edward Purcell and others.

Overcoming numerous obstacles and objections, he led the first trip by a group of Chinese-American scientists to the People's Republic of China since World War II.