Michelle Dong Wang is a Chinese-American physicist who is the James Gilbert White Distinguished Professor of the Physical Sciences at Cornell University.
[1] She moved to the Chinese Academy of Sciences for her graduate studies, where she majored in physics and earned a doctorate in 1986.
Wang moved to the United States in 1986, where she worked toward a master's degree at the University of Southern Mississippi.
Her research considers biological molecular motors, including RNA polymerase molecules which move along the DNA template during cell division.
[4] Wang has pioneered several structural probes to better understand molecular motors, including angular optical trapping, DNA unzipping and nanophotonics.