Washington D.C. –
Forty years of fortunate turns takes a career to new heights as Yi-Ming Wang, Sc.D., a senior solar physicist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), earns the 2026 recipient of the prestigious George Ellery Hale Prize, one of the highest honors in solar physics awarded by the Solar Physics Division of the American Astronomical Society.
The Hale Prize recognizes scientists for outstanding contributions to solar astronomy and honors those whose work has fundamentally advanced understanding of the Sun and its influence throughout the heliosphere. Wang was recognized for his seminal discoveries and groundbreaking contributions to the study of the Sun’s magnetic fields, the solar wind, the solar-cycle dynamo, and variability in total solar irradiance, as well as for the profound and lasting impact of his work on solar and heliospheric physics.
Throughout his career at NRL, Wang has helped shape modern understanding of how the Sun’s magnetic field evolves, how solar wind is generated and how solar variability influences Earth and the near-space environment.
“Dr. Wang’s career exemplifies the legacy honored by the Hale Prize,” said Amy Winebarger, Ph.D., chair of NRL’s Solar Physics Division. “His foundational discoveries and enduring models have shaped modern heliophysics and will continue to guide research and operational forecasting for decades to come.”
For Wang, the recognition reflects decades of scientific discovery, collaboration and what he describes as a series of fortunate turns.
“I was extremely lucky,” Wang said. “I like solar physics because there are so many observations. When I was in high-energy astrophysics, I was studying neutron stars and pulsars, but there were almost no observations, so it was mostly speculation. In solar physics, there were tons of data, and much of it had not been closely looked at.”
Wang originally wanted to join NRL to work in radio astronomy. In 1985 while conducting research in high-energy astrophysics at Bonn University in Germany, he had connected with NRL scientists and Humboldt Fellows Maurice Shapiro, Ph. D., and Ken Johnston Ph.D., who were visiting the university. After arriving at NRL, a new opportunity emerged when renowned NRL solar physicist and 2009 Hale Prize winner Neil Sheeley, Ph.D., secured funding to hire two scientists to work on magnetic flux transport models.
“I hired him,” Sheeley said. “That was in 1986.”
“The only reason he chose me,” Wang said, “was because as an undergraduate I had worked on a paper with a well-known solar physicist. Neil told me, `I hired you because I was familiar with that paper’.”
That unexpected shift launched Wang into solar physics, where he would spend the next four decades studying the Sun’s magnetic behavior and helping explain some of heliophysics’ most enduring questions.
Sheeley said what quickly became clear was Wang’s extraordinary ability to think deeply and move fast.
“He is a scientist’s scientist,” Sheeley said. “We would have discussion sessions at the whiteboard late in the afternoon, and I’d go home looking forward to the next morning when I could start working on these really neat ideas. Then I’d come in the next morning, and there would be a draft of the paper on my desk. He had worked all night.”
During the first phase of his NRL career, Wang worked closely with Sheeley to study the solar dynamo, the process that generates the Sun’s magnetic fields, and how those fields are transported across the solar surface, shaping the solar cycle.
“At that time, it was a new field,” Wang said. “Almost everything we found was new and important, so we were very lucky.”
His early work also laid the foundation for the Wang–Sheeley–Arge (WSA) solar wind model, now a cornerstone of both solar physics research and operational space weather forecasting. The model is widely used to predict solar wind conditions throughout the heliosphere and helps improve forecasting of the Sun–Earth environment, including impacts to satellites, communications and critical infrastructure.
“This was a model on how to use the Sun’s magnetic fields to forecast what the solar wind would be, far from the Sun,” Sheeley said. “Yi-Ming was the one that really came up with the idea on how it worked.”
Sheeley noted that the team originally developed the model simply to better understand the solar wind, not to create an operational forecasting tool.
“We were working on it because we wanted to understand how the solar wind worked,” Sheeley said. “This was curiosity. We were not deliberately trying to create a model that would be useful for people. But it turned out to be good, and people started using it.”
Later, Wang contributed to research involving the Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO), an NRL-developed instrument aboard the SOHO spacecraft launched in 1995. LASCO provided unprecedented observations of the Sun’s corona and coronal mass ejections, helping scientists better understand solar eruptions that can disrupt communications and power systems on Earth.
“Again, almost everything LASCO observed was new,” Wang said. “It was a very exciting era.”
Around 2005, Wang began collaborating with NRL scientist Judith Lean, Ph.D., on the total energy output of the Sun. Lean is a 2024 Hale Prize winner, member of the National Academy of Sciences, and now NRL Emeritus. Their research showed that changes in the Sun’s output were too small to explain modern global warming, helping provide important scientific clarity on climate trends.
“We modeled the evolution of the Sun’s total radiation output and found there was actually only a very small long-term change in the irradiance,” Wang said.
Wang has also emphasized the importance of observations in driving scientific understanding. In his
2022 Perspective article in Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences, “From Coronal Holes to Pulsars and Back Again,” he reflected that one of the most important lessons of his career was the value of closely examining data rather than relying solely on theory.
“It pays to look closely at the available observations,” Wang wrote. “Theoretical models that are not based on a close examination of observations are likely to be wrong.”
He credits much of his success to the scientific environment at NRL and the colleagues who helped shape his career.
“It’s been a great place to do solar physics. Better than I could have imagined when I first started working here 40 years ago,” Wang said.
Since the Hale Prize was established in 1987, NRL scientists have an extraordinary record of earning the award in a global field of thousands of researchers.
“There are probably close to 3,000 solar physicists in the world,” Wang said. “There have been
39 awards in the last 39 years, and NRL has won eight of them. That’s impressive.”
Sheeley said that record reflects the enduring strength of NRL’s solar physics community.
“NRL’s solar physics has been really good, and it's been good ever since it started,” Sheeley said. “That tells you something about the place and the people here.”
While Wang said it is always gratifying to receive recognition, he views the award less as a personal milestone and more as a reflection of the relationships built throughout a lifetime in science.
Wang will formally receive the
2026 George Ellery Hale Prize at the Solar Physics Division’s 57th meeting in Baltimore, where he will deliver the Hale Prize Lecture reflecting on his scientific career and its impact on understanding the Sun and heliosphere.
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