When a scientist from Canada and another from Japan won the Nobel Prize for Physics last week, the University of Hawaii was cheering proudly.

Arthur B. McDonald, professor emeritus of Queen’s University in Canada, is a UH affiliate professor of physics, and Takaaki Kajita of the University of Tokyo has ties to UH as well.

What’s more, UH physics professor John Learned conducted some key early analysis and wrote the first draft of the research paper that led to the prize-winning discovery — that the subatomic particles known as neutrinos change identities and have mass.

“We’re very happy about the reward,” Learned said Monday.

The discovery, according to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, “has changed our understanding of the innermost workings of matter and can prove crucial to our view of the universe.”

UH-Manoa Chancellor Robert Bley-Vroman said he’s thrilled the Nobel laureates have such strong ties to the university.

“In fact, professor McDonald is scheduled to return to campus in early 2016, when he will continue his work with the High Energy Physics group and, hopefully, will participate in a Nobel Prize celebration and possible public lecture,” Bley-Vroman said in a news release. “We join the world in congratulating the Nobel winners and our Department of Physics and Astronomy.”

McDonald led a group that demonstrated in 2001 that neutrinos from the sun switched identity by the time they arrived at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory  in Ontario, Canada.

McDonald, an affiliate professor in UH-Manoa’s Department of Physics and Astronomy since 2010, spends about three months of every year here giving seminars and brainstorming on neutrino physics and dark matter with members of the university’s High Energy Physics group.

In the late 1990s, Kajita presented the discovery that neutrinos from the atmosphere switch identities on their way to the Super-Kamiokande underground detector in Japan, a collaboration of about 100 mostly Japanese and American scientists.

Together, the discoveries led to the conclusion that neutrinos, which for years were considered to have no mass, must have some mass, small though it may be.

“The discovery rewarded with this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics have yielded crucial insights into the all but hidden world of neutrinos,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a news release. “After photons, the particles of light, neutrinos are the most numerous in the entire cosmos. The Earth is constantly bombarded by them.”

Learned, who conducted analysis of some of the early data from the “Super-K” experiment, said he started predicting the neutrino project would win the Nobel Prize back in 1998.

At least five of Learned’s students used the Super-K’s groundbreaking results in their dissertations over the years, including UH physics Ph.D. student John Flanagan, who was the first to do it in 1997.

Learned continues to collaborate in the experiment, which has revealed even more discoveries over the years.

“The Super-K is the gift that continues to give,” he said.

The methods of analysis developed in Hawaii have become standard in the field of neutrino oscillations, officials said. The theory work of UH professor Sandip Pakvasa and others in the High Energy Physics group has been linked with both the Super-Kamiokande and Sudbury Neutrino Observatory efforts, they said.

“It’s an honor for us in the SNO collaboration to share the Nobel Prize with the Super-Kamiokande collaboration in which my colleagues at the University of Hawaii have played such a major role,” McDonald said in a statement. “I enjoy discussing physics with and learning from the UH experimental and theoretical particle physicists.”