Acknowledgements
The life in graduate school has been one of the most important experiences in my
life. I would like to express my appreciation to many people who made this
possible.
First of all, I would like to thank my advisor, Prof. Charles M. Lieber, for his
advice and inspiration, who has offered me great opportunities and constant
inspiration. Professor Lieber is an incredible advisor and a great mentor. I want to
thank him for providing invaluable guidance to me in science and research. I admire
his constant enthusiasm and persistence for exploring new things and concepts.
I greatly appreciate his support, which has been critical to my research at Harvard
these years, and his patience to help me improve my capability of research, writing,
and presentation.
My sincere gratitude is also due to members of my Graduate Advising
Committee, Prof. Xiaowei Zhuang, Prof. Daniel Nocera, and Prof. Sunney Xie for
the time they spent discussing my research and giving me invaluable advice for
achieving my results, and great support they offered.
I also want to thank Dr. Jinlin Huang, for his valuable advice, tremendous
support, and trust throughout these years. It is very pleasure to me to work with
Jinlin, who is a very experienced person in electronics. His exceptional insights are
greatly appreciated.
I would like to acknowledge Prof. Bozhi Tian, Prof. Quan Qing, and Prof. Zhe
Yu, who gave me great help and bring me into thefield of nanoscience, nano-
electronics, and nanobiotechnology area. Without them, the work in this thesis
would not have been possible achieved. I would like to acknowledge Prof. Tal Dvir,
Zengguang Cheng, Xiaochuan Dai, Dr. Wei Zhou, Prof. Xiaojie Duan, Tian-ming
Fu, and Dr. Chong Xie for the fruitful collaborations. The many hours of discussion
have enriched my knowledge in many ways. I also want to thank Dr. Ping Xie for
his tremendous help for the fabrication, electronics, and measurement; Dr. Jun Yao
for his inspiration in nanowire assembly and electronics characterization; and
Dr. Lu Wang and Sirui Zou for their great help in the biomolecular sensing
experiments. I would like to thank Zhe Jiang, Dr. Thomas Kempa, Dr. Hao Yan,
xi