Liu Shenggang

Liu Shenggang was born in December 1933 in Hefei, Anhui Province. Chinese Wikipedia gives his date of birth as 25 December 1933 and his family home as Feidong County near Hefei. He finished high school at the middle school attached to Nanjing University in 1951 and entered Zhejiang University to study electrical engineering.

In the 1953 reorganisation of Chinese higher education he transferred to the radio department of the Nanjing Institute of Technology, now Southeast University, where he graduated in 1955 in electron vacuum devices and stayed on as a teaching assistant. He joined the Communist Party of China in 1954.

In 1956 Liu moved to Chengdu to help establish the Chengdu Institute of Radio Engineering, which later became the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China. From 1956 to 1958 he was a graduate student of the Soviet specialist Lebedev and also worked as a translator, receiving a candidate of sciences degree in 1958. He became a professor in 1978 and was elected a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1980.

He became vice president of the institute in August 1984 and served as president of the university from 1986 to April 2001. Under his leadership it strengthened teaching reform, built major research platforms, won several national key disciplines and was among the first universities selected for Project 211.

His research covered microwave electronics, relativistic electronics, electron cyclotron masers, free electron lasers and terahertz science. His kinetic theory built on the electron guiding centre coordinate system became one of the mainstream methods for gyrotron research worldwide, and his team developed China's first gyrotron. Around 2000 he proposed that China develop terahertz science and technology, convened a Xiangshan Science Conference on the subject and led the creation of a terahertz expert committee. He proposed the coaxial double electron beam gyrotron and built the first terahertz gyrotron in China.

He was also a vice president of the Chinese Institute of Electronics, president of the Chinese vacuum electronics society, a senior science adviser to the United Nations Development Programme, a Fellow of the IEEE, a delegate to the 12th National Congress of the Communist Party and a member of the 7th and 8th National Committees of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. In 2008 he joined the presidium of the Academy's academic divisions.

Little has been published about Liu Shenggang's family life. His university described him as a scientist who sought truth, cared little for fame or gain and devoted himself to his students over more than seventy years of teaching. In 2008 he founded the Academician Liu Shenggang Science and Education Fund to reward students and staff working in terahertz research.

Liu Shenggang died of illness at 7.26 in the morning on 30 October 2026 in Chengdu, aged 92. The University of Electronic Science and Technology of China announced his death the same day, and the news was carried by Xinhua, People's Daily and CCTV. A farewell ceremony was held in the Ginkgo Hall of the Chengdu Funeral Home at 9.30 on the morning of 3 November 2026.

Liu is remembered as the father of vacuum and microwave electronics in China and as one of the first scientists to push the country into terahertz research. Many of the students he trained became leading figures in China's electronic information industry and research, and his team was among the first selected as a national model teaching team. His long presidency transformed the Chengdu university into one of China's leading institutions for electronics.