Experimental particle physicist Prof. Jun Cao has been appointed as the new director of the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, effective October 2024, succeeding Yifang Wang, who has held the position since 2011.

Jun Cao earned his B.Sc. degree from Wuhan University in 1993 and his Ph.D. from IHEP in 1998. He completed postdoctoral fellowships at the Linear Accelerator Laboratory in France in 2000 and the University of Michigan in the USA in 2004. Since joining IHEP in 2004, Prof. Cao has led the design and construction of the antineutrino detector, as well as data analysis for the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment, which measured the smallest neutrino mixing angle theta13 in early 2012. He has served as the co-spokesperson of Daya Bay since 2013.

Prof. Cao is one of the initiators of the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) and serves as its deputy spokesperson. He has also proposed the Taishan Antineutrino Observatory (TAO). His contributions have been recognized with the Outstanding Science and Technology Achievement Prize of CAS in 2013, the C.N. Yang Award of the Association of Asia-Pacific Physical Societies in 2013, and the First Prize of the State Natural Science Award of China in 2016. He was selected as a New Cornerstone Investigator in 2023.