Mengxia Liu wins NSF CAREER Award for work to decode light on a single chip
For her work on building compact devices that can read the color and twist of light at once, Mengxia Liu has won a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Liu, assistant professor of electrical & computer engineering, will use the five-year grant to develop a new class of light-sensing devices based on a chiral semiconductor material. The NSF CAREER Award is a prestigious honor for young faculty members and supports the early career activities of teachers and scholars who are considered most likely to become the academic leaders of the future.
Light carries more than just brightness. Its color, or wavelength, and the direction its waves spiral – known as circular polarization – both carry information that engineers use in secure communications, medical imaging, and remote sensing. Today, reading both signals at once requires bulky instruments, that are often too slow and incompatible for use in modern microelectronics.
“Today, researchers often need a whole tabletop setup of optics/devices/components to measure both the color of light and the way it oscillates,” Liu said. “We're working toward a compact electronic device that will give us both answers out of a single chip.”
Liu's approach relies on chiral semiconductors, a class of materials whose atomic structure lacks mirror symmetry, similar to the difference between a person's left and right hand. That asymmetry allows the material to respond differently depending on which way a light wave twists, converting that directional information directly into an electrical signal. By also tracking how deep different wavelengths of light penetrate the material before generating that signal, Liu's team aims to extract both the color and the polarization of incoming light from the same device. A neural network will then decode these combined signals, pulling apart the color and polarization information from a single sweep of voltage, without any moving parts or filters.
“Instead of analyzing light with a series of filters and optical components, we're exploring whether the material itself can do much of that work for us,” Liu said.
The resulting technology could enable smaller, faster sensors for applications ranging from secure optical communication to biological sensing and imaging, while also advancing the basic science of how light and electron spin interact in this emerging family of materials.
Liu is a member of Yale's Energy Sciences Institute at West Campus, where researchers from engineering, chemistry, physics, and materials science collaborate on challenges in energy and advanced materials.
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Published Date
Jul 9, 2026
