Prof. Sheng’s research is in the area of condensed matter physics. He has pioneered the study of liquid crystal-substrate interaction while at the RCA David Sarnoff Research Laboratory, and established the mechanisms of charging-energy correlated hopping and fluctuation-induced tunneling conduction in disordered materials. While at Exxon, Prof. Sheng’s interest broadened into wave interaction and scattering in disordered systems, and porous media. The study of nanotechnology became his main focus after joining HKUST, where he led the efforts in the discovery of superconducting behavior in ultrathin carbon nanotubes, and the giant electrorheological effect in suspensions of nanoparticles. He is also the inventor of locally resonant sonic materials that can break the mass density law in shielding low frequency sound. More recently, Prof. Sheng and his colleagues resolved the classical problem of moving contact line in two phase immiscible flows, by applying Onsager’s principle of minimum energy dissipation to the derivation of hydrodynamic boundary conditions.