2022 IEEE President K.J. Ray Liu Honored for His Leadership

Unlike many budding engineers, K.J. Ray Liu wasn’t inspired to enter the field by tinkering with electronics or following in the footsteps of a family member. Growing up in Taichung, Taiwan, he answered his government’s call for students to become electrical engineers to help manufacture semiconductors in the 1970s, when the country’s economy was struggling.“Students who were good in math, science, and physics all wanted to be an electrical engineer because that was the top priority of the government,” Liu says. “That’s how I got into engineering. Now Taiwan is a world leader in semiconductors.”K.J. Ray LiuOccupationRetired professor of information technology and a digital signal processing researcher at the University of Maryland in College Park Member gradeFellow Alma matersNational Taiwan University; University of Michigan; UCLABut by the time he graduated from university in 1983, semiconductor facilities were still under construction, so there were no jobs availab