Haoning Tang, PhD

Tang Lab Main Mission

Welcome! My name is Haoning Tang, and I am an incoming Assistant Professor at the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering (as of Spring 2026) and an adjunct Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley. I received a Ph.D. (2021) in Applied Physics from Harvard University and a B.Eng. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) in 2016. From 2021 to 2024, I was a Harvard Quantum Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University.

I'm the recipient of the SONY faculty innovation award in 2025, the Rising Star of Light Award in 2024, the Harvard Quantum Initiative (HQI) Fellowship in 2021, and the Harvard Hong Kong Jockey Club Fellowship in 2017.

I'm a 70% experimentalist and 30% theorist. My research covers a wide variety of topics ranging from nanophotonics, quantum materials, optical metamaterials, nonlinear and quantum optics, micro(nano)electromechanical systems (MEMS), integrated photonics, nanotechnology and nanofabrication, and nanophotonic devices, and their applications to the development of novel light sources, detectors, and photonic integrated systems. You can learn more about my research in the Research section. A list of my published work can be found on the Publications page. This website also contains general information on my work and publications.

My group works on research that includes interdisciplinary topics in material science, nanophotonics, and devices. This will include:

In situ tuning of the mechanical, electrical, and optical properties of single/multilayer quantum materials, thin films, and metamaterials:
- Twist angle, interlayer gap, translational distance, pressure, pressure gradient, strain
- Gating voltage
- Nonlinear index
MEMS for probing the material properties and sensing:
- Force & strain sensing
- Hyperimaging, high-dimensional sensor
Engineering of hyper-reconfigurable light sources—giant nonlinearity, tunable entanglement source, tunable single emitters, and tunable lasers.
Controllable strong light-matter interaction through cavity enhancement and thin film strain tuning.
Meta-optic high-dimensional sensors and multidimensional modulators.

Recent Events and News:

Aug 14th: I will be giving an invited talk at the LBNL Molecular Foundry User Meeting.
July 15th: I will be giving an invited talk at IEEE EDS MEMS TC Webinar (online).
May 5th: I will be organizing a Special Symposia - Twistopics for Light-Matter Interactions in CLEO 2025 Long Beach. Check and join us!
Apr 3rd, 2025: My first author Nature Photonics Paper An adaptive moiré sensor for spectro-polarimetric hyperimaging is online and is being reported by Harvard News Story!
I'm giving several Faculty Candidate Talks on the following dates:

Apr 3rd, 2025: ECE Seminar, Duke University

Mar 11th, 2025: ECE Seminar, University of Washington, Seattle

Mar 6th, 2025: Mech Seminar, MIT

Feb 28th, 2025: ECE Seminar, New York University

Feb 25th, 2025: ECE Seminar, Boston University

Feb 19th, 2025: ECE Seminar, Purdue University

Feb 17th, 2025: ECE Seminar, Princeton University

Feb 13th, 2025: PHYS Seminar, Vanderbilt University

Feb 10th, 2025: MSE Seminar, Georgia Institute of Technology

Feb 5th, 2025: ECE Seminar, University of Texas at Austin

Feb 2nd, 2025: EEE Seminar, Nanyang Technology University (online)

Jan 6th, 2025: Mech Seminar, Hong Kong University (online)

Jan 28th, 2025: I will be giving an invited talk at SPIE Photonics West.
Jan 13th, 2025: I will be giving the Optics and Electronics Seminar at Stanford University.
Dec 19th, 2024: My last author paper is online at Physical Review Letters! Control of chirality and directionality of nonlinear metasurface light source via moiré engineering.
Dec 4th, 2024: I will be giving an invited talk at the MRS Boston on twisted optical 2D materials this Wednesday 10:45am-11:15am in session EL06. It would be nice to catch up with my old and new friends there!
Nov 4th, 2024: Thrilled to receive the Rising Stars of Light Award from Springer Nature, Light Sci. Appl., and iCANX Association. Inspirational listening to all other fantastic works. Congratulations to the other finalists and award winners!
Oct 9th, 2024: I posted a last author paper on arxiv, Control of chirality and directionality of nonlinear metasurface light source via twisting.
Aug 21st, 2024: I published a first-author paper on Nature! On-chip multi-degree-of-freedom control of two-dimensional materials.
Aug 13th, 2024: I'm giving an invited talk at the University of Southern California, ECE on Twisting light with a nanomachine.
July 12th, 2024: Collaborated with Beicheng, we published a paper on ACS Photonics. Free-Space Beam Steering with Twisted Bilayer Photonic Crystal Slabs.
May 31st, 2024: I'm giving an invited talk at the Hong Kong University, EEE on Twisting light with a nanomachine.
May 8th, 2024: I will be giving three special talks on our latest super exciting results of on-chip active twistoptics in this year's CLEO. We have five CLEO papers this year!
I'm giving several Faculty Candidate Talks on the following dates: