Foundation of MEMA

Chang Liu received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the California Institute of Technology in 1991 and 1995, respectively. His Ph.D. thesis was titled Micromachined sensors and actuators for fluid mechanics applications. In January 1996, he joined the Microelectronics Laboratory of the University of Illinois as a postdoctoral researcher. In January 1997, he became an assistant professor with major appointment in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and joint appointment in the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department. In 2003, he was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure. In 2007, Chang Liu joined Northwestern University (Evanston, Illinois) as a full professor of engineering. He established the MedX Laboratory to conduct advanced engineering research for medicine and health care.

Dr. Liu has 20 years of research experience in the MEMS area and has published 200 technical papers in journals and refereed conference proceedings. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses covering broad-ranging topics, including MEMS, solid-state electronics, electromechanics, sensor technology, circuits, dynamics, and heat transfer. He won a campus "Incomplete list of teachers ranked as excellent" honor in 2001 for developing and teaching the MEMS class, a precursor to this book. He received the National Science Foundation's CAREER award in 1998 for his research proposal of developing artificial haircells using MEMS technology. He is currently a Subject Editor of the IEEE/ASME Journal of MEMS, and was an Associate Editor of the IEEE Sensors Journal. His work has been cited in popular media. Dr. Liu is a cofounder of Integrated Micro Devices (IMD) Corporation and a member of the scientific advisory board of NanoInk Corporation (Chicago, IL). In 2004, he won the University of Illinois College of Engineering Xerox Award for Faculty Research. In the same year, he was elected a Faculty Associate at the Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Illinois, to pursue research in large-format integrated sensors. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, the world's largest professional association for the advancement of technology.