Professor Bing Zhang, Founding Director of the Hong Kong Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (HKIAA) and Chair Professor of Astrophysics in the Department of Physics at The University of Hong Kong (HKU), has been ranked fifth in the world in Astronomy & Astrophysics in the single-year impact ranking of the Stanford/Elsevier Top 2% Scientists List 2026.
Compiled by a team at Stanford University, the list draws on data from Scopus, the world’s largest abstract and citation database, and covers 22 scientific fields and 174 subfields. Researchers are ranked by a composite citation indicator, in two separate rankings: single-year impact and career-long impact. Each ranking in 2026 includes nearly 250,000 scientists. In the single-year ranking, 2,108 Hong Kong scholars made the global top 2%, up more than 15% from 1,821 last year. According to Wen Wei Po, 16 Hong Kong-based scientists were ranked in the global top 10 of their fields this year, up from 13 last year. Professor Zhang is among them.
Professor Zhang is a Global STEM Scholar and a theoretical astrophysicist. His research focuses on high-energy astrophysics, including black holes across all mass scales, neutron stars of various types, and the relativistic jets they launch. He is a world leader in the physics of gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) and one of the most cited researchers in the field. His work was twice selected for Science’s “Top Ten Breakthroughs of the Year”, in 2005 and 2020. He is a recipient of the Bruno Rossi Prize of the American Astronomical Society and has been elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society.
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