Dr. Xiaochen Jiang, and Prof. Tzahi Cohen-Karni, for their great help in experi-
ments. Discussions with them inspired me in many ways. I also want to thank
Robert Day and Max Mankin for their great efforts on maintaining the nanowire
growth setup and bring me lots of tips for the chemical vapor growth. My sincere
thanks are also due to Dr. James Cahoon, Dr. Yongjie Hu, Dr. SungWoo Nam,
Hwan Sung Choe, Dr. Jang-Ung Park, Dr. Steffen Strehle, Dr. Yajie Dong, Ruixuan
Gao, Dr. Didier Casanova, Lin Xu, Dr. Peter Kruskal, Dr. Jae-Hyun Lee, Tao Zhou,
Wenshan Zheng, and Sean You for the help and support, and making lab such a
pleasure place to work. I want to express my great gratitude to Dr. Yue Yang for
teaching my skill for neuron cell culture, Jiang He for immunostaining, and Dr.
Lihua Jin and Prof. Zhigang Suo for their great help in mechanical simulation and
subsequent inspiration for electronics design. I appreciate technical help from Yuan
Lu, Jiandong Deng, and Steve Shepard, and also the administrative assistance from
Purvant Patel, Kathleen Ledyard, and Renée Donlon.
I would like to thank my parents for their endless love, unfailing support,
tremendous trust, and encouragement for all these years of my studies and helped
me go through those difficult times.
Finally, I am grateful to all of you who have directly or indirectly contributed to
the completion of this work.
xii Acknowledgements