WEI BAO obtained his B.S. in Astrophysics from Peking University in 1983, his M.S. from Institute of Theoretical Physics - Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1986, and his Ph.D. in Physics from The Johns Hopkins University in 1995. He worked as a consultant in AT&T Bell Laboratories - Murray Hill in 1994 and performed his postdoctoral research in Brookhaven National Laboratory from 1995 to 1998 before joining the Technical Staff of Los Alamos National Laboratory. He was a Distinguished Professor at Renmin University of China in Beijing from 2009 to 2019. Since 2019, he has been a Chair Professor in physics at City University of Hong Kong. He has led the design and construction of a suite of innovative and complimentary cold-neutron inelastic spectrometers at China Advanced Research Reactor in Beijing as the PI of a ￥111 million National Key Research Infrastructure Project.

Using elastic and inelastic neutron scattering as the main research tool, Prof. BAO has investigated frontier issues of correlated electronic phenomena in condensed matter, including the Mott metal-insulator transition, giant magnetoresistivity, orbital ordering, re-entrant spin-glass state, itinerant antiferromagnetism, low-dimensional quantum antiferromagnetism and unconventional superconductivity in heavy-fermion, cuprate and iron-based materials, often under extreme condition at low temperature, high pressure and high magnetic field. These works have led to more than 200 invited talks in US, Europe, Asia and Oceania.

Prof. BAO was nominated a Fellow of American Physical Society in 2012 by Division of Condensed Matter Physics "for neutron scattering studies of the magnetic structure and spin dynamics of highly correlated electron systems". He was nominated a Fellow of the Physical Society of Hong Kong in 2022 "for his seminal works on correlated electron systems and disordered quantum systems subjected to the extreme conditions using neutron scattering techniques".