HIGHLIGHTS OCTOBER 2021 | IEEE NANOTECHNOLOGY MAGAZINE | 3 JEAN-PIERRE LEBURTON WAS born in Liège, Belgium, 4 March 1949, to Edmond Leburton and Charlotte Joniaux. His father was a well-known Bel- gian statesman who served in various positions as a minister in the king’s gov- ernment from 1954 to 1971 and ulti- mately as his prime minister in 1973. His mother was the daughter of a civil engi- neer, Charles Joniaux, who was involved in the construction of the Peking–Han- kow railroad in China at the beginning of the 20th century. He had a younger brother, Eddy, who passed away in 1993. Leburton started elementary school at the Athénée Adolf Max in Brussels in 1954 during his father’s first tenure as the Minister of Public Health to finish in 1960 at the Athénée Royal in Waremme, Belgium, where his father was the mayor and a house representative. He entered middle and high school in the same insti- tution, where he studied Latin, mathe- matics, and basic sciences among his main courses. His decision to study physics at the University of Liège, Belgium, was sparked by his reading of two compre- hensive volumes, “Contemporary Scienc- es,” edited by Louis Leprince-Ringuet, as a gift from his father when he was in the 11th grade. In 1971, he obtained his license (bachelor of science) in physics with grande distinction (magna cum laude). After two years as a teaching assistant in the Experimental Physics group at the University of Liège, he spent a year as a coopérant technique universitaire at the Mohammadia School of Engineers in Rabat, Morocco, where he taught ther- modynamics, statistical physics, and mechanics for freshman and sophomore students. In 1975, he came back to the University of Liège to pursue a doctorate in theoretical physics and graduated in 1978 with la plus grande distinction (summa cum laude) for his thesis “Theo- ry of Electrical Conductivity in Polar Semiconductors.” One year later, he joined the Depart- ment of Halbleiter Technik (semiconduc- tor techniques) with Siemens A.G. in Munich, Germany, where he worked for two years on modeling hot carriers in short-channel metal–oxide semiconductor transistors in Gerhard Dorda’s group. During that time at a group seminar, he met Dr. Klaus von Klitzing, who had just published his seminal paper on the quan- tum hall effect. Anecdotally, the sparse audience at the time, including members of the research laboratory’s upper man- agement, missing the work fundamentals, focused instead on its potential for elec- tronic applications. On that, Dr. von Klitzing diligently emphasized its impor- tance in metrology, which, in addition to associating his name with a new resistance standard, propelled him to being awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics four years later. In September 1981, Leburton was invited by Dr. Karl Hess to join the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois as a visiting assistant professor to work on modeling ballistic transport in semiconductor devic- es. Two years later, he accepted a tenure- track position with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. One of his first undertakings was the investigation of the effects of periodicity and aluminum (Al) composition on the dielectric constant of gallium arsenide (GaAs)/AlGaAs superlattices, for which he developed a full-band theory ap- proach. Hence, he was able to explain the variations of the index of refraction observed among the patterned regions of GaAs-AlAs superlattices and the AlGaAs alloys obtained by the selective zinc inter- diffusion achieved by the Holonyak group [1]. Simultaneously, he theoretical- ly explored the possibility of producing high-efficiency energy conversion with periodically N- and P-doped structures by proposing a new type of solar cell, which, as of today, still draws attention in the photovoltaic community [2]. Leburton’s interest also extended to quantum devices to achieve negative dif- ferential resistance (NDR), which led him to propose the first vertical tunneling field-effect transistors (FETs) for high- speed applications, where the NDR onset is controlled by a metal gate [3]. Of a similar vein was his prediction of a new tunneling mechanism for real-space trans- fer in modulation-doped structures, evi- denced a couple of years later [4]. It is during that time that he also focused on the effect of quantum confinement on charge-carrier scattering affecting elec- tronic transport in semiconductors, espe- cially in quantum wires. To validate his approach, he developed the first multi- subband Monte Carlo simulation of 1D systems [5], predicting various new effects, such as optic-phonon-enhanced mobility with anomalous carrier cool- ing, optic-phonon-induced resonant intersubband scattering with population inversion, and later, the onset of antireso- nant-hopping conductance and negative Perspectives in Quantum Devices and Computational Nanotechnology by Jean-Pierre Leburton JEAN-PIERRE LEBURTON Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MNANO.2021.3097488 Date of current version: 22 September 2021