Putting a new spin on computer hardware

Luqiao Liu was the kind of child who preferred to disassemble his toys to learn how they worked to play with them as intended.

Liu’s lifelong drive for curiosity led him to MIT, where he now serves as a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics and is a newly tenured associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

He is now creating next-generation electronics that consume significantly less power than conventional devices by utilizing novel materials and nanoscale fabrication methods rather than disassembling them.He says that curiosity is still useful, especially since he and his colleagues work in spin electronics, a field that only emerged in the 1980s and is largely unexplored.