Bio: Charles Tu joined the UCSD faculty in 1988. After earning his Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Yale University in 1978, he was a physics lecturer at Yale University until 1980. From 1980-88, Tu was a member of the technical staff at AT&T Bell Laboratories. Since 1995 Tu has been an adjunct professor at Korea's National Kwang-ju Institute of Science and Technology. Between 1981-97 he was ranked #613 most-widely cited physicists among 500,000 authors, as compiled by the Institute of Scientific Information. In 2002, he was elected a Fellow of the IEEE, and his other awards include the Horace Watson Gold Metal in Physics from McGill University (1971) and Distinguished Members of Technical Staff from AT&T Bell Labs (1987).

Research: Gas-source molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) of III-V compound semiconductors heterostructures for electronic and optoelectronic applications. He set up two of the first three or four gas-source MBE systems in U.S. universities. With these systems, his group is able to advance the capability of MBE into arsenide/phosphide/nitride-based heterostructures and selective-area regrowth on patterned-and-etched substrates to improve device performance.