After his graduating with his bachelor's degree at
National Taiwan University and earning his
Ph.D. from the University of Missouri, he became a research fellow at the
California Institute of Technology. He then taught at the
University of California at Berkeley from 1966 until 1977, when he joined the faculty at Harvard University. He was named the Mallinckrodt Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Harvard in 1988. He retired in 2006. He was elected as an
academician of the
Taiwan Academia Sinica in 1982 and a member of the
United States National Academy of Sciences. Wang discovered
DNA topoisomerases (or local enzymes) and proposed a mechanism for their operation in the 1970s. He also studied the configuration (or topology) of DNA, an approach that proved fruitful in helping to explain how the structure of the
double helix coils and relaxes. ==References==