Gang Logan Liu
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Micro & Nanotechnology Lab
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
loganliu@illinois.edu
In recent years, there have been significant research efforts to develop new molecular sensing and cellular imaging instrumentation for point-of-care and bedside diagnostics applications; however, the augmented performance usually requires the addition of expensive specialized equipment. My MoboSens research efforts aim at inventing new biosensing and imaging solutions from a very different angle, by engineering nanoelectronic and nanophotonic chips to permit low-cost yet high-performance molecular and cell-sensing wearable and portable devices. These molecular precision biosensing electronics are integrated with ubiquitous computing platforms, such as mobile phones or short-range wireless networks, potentially providing interfaces to existing health information systems in current clinical environments.
G. Logan Liu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Micro and Nanotechnology Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has a multidisciplinary educational background, having been trained in both engineering technology development and clinical medical research. He obtained his joint Ph.D. degree in Bioengineering from the University of California-Berkeley and the University of California-San Francisco with an outstanding publication award. His graduate research focused on developing micro and nanophotonic and electronic molecular detection systems for cancer diagnosis and therapy. He received his postdoctoral training at the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center in San Francisco, where he worked with breast and prostate oncologists and clinical medical workers to apply novel nanotechnologies in diagnosing and curing cancers. After that medical postdoctoral training, he joined Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory with a prestigious Lawrence Fellowship, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy to foster the nanobiotechnology research there for biodefense applications. In 2008, Prof. Liu joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His expertise includes design, modeling, and fabrication of nanoelectronic and nanophotonic devices and their biomedical applications. His current research interests are in developing “nanobionics” by integrating solid-state optoelectronic nanodevices with functional biomolecules and studying the properties of electrons, photons, and ions in the hybrid system. In his vision, varieties of nanobionics systems will be created for applications in health care, energy harvesting, and environmental protection.