Qing Hu is a principal investigator in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He received his B.A. from Lanzhow University in 1981 and his Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University in 1987. From 1987 to 1989, he was a postdoctoral associate at University of California, Berkeley. He joined the MIT faculty in 1990 in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He was promoted to full Hu has made significant contributions to physics and device applications over a broad electromagnetic spectrum from millimeter wave, THz, to infrared frequencies. Among those contributions, the most distinctive is his development of high-performance terahertz (THz) quantum cascade lasers (QCLs). Now, this breakthrough has already found applications in heterodyne receiver technology and real‐time THz imaging, which was also pioneered by his group.

He is a Fellow of OSA, American Physical Society, IEEE, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is the recipient of 2012 IEEE William Streifer Scientific Achievement Award, the Nick Holonyak, Jr. Award, and others. He has been an Associate Editor of Applied Physics Letters since 2006, and was the co-chair of 2006 International Workshop on Quantum Cascade Lasers.