After completing his PhD at Peking University in June 2024 and a brief postdoctoral stint at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Jiang now leads his own research group as a principal investigator at the university's School of Electronics.

"From Shandong University to Peking University and then to MIT, it has been nine years in a flash," he told DeepTech, a Beijing-based partner of MIT Technology Review, in a July 2025 interview.

Jiang earned his master's from Shandong University in 2020, receiving its President's Award, and his PhD from Peking University in 2024, where he was awarded the May Fourth Medal, the university's highest student honour, the SCMP reported.

His breakthrough moment came on July 17 last year, when he published a paper in Science as corresponding author and co-first author reporting a major advance in InSe semiconductor manufacturing. The study demonstrated the first wafer-scale production of high-quality crystalline InSe films, advancing the material from single-device laboratory demonstrations to a large-scale, integrable platform for next-generation electronics.

In a 2023 paper in Nature, Jiang had already become the first researcher to show that a single InSe transistor could outperform traditional silicon in energy efficiency. He also co-authored a 2025 paper in Nature Materials demonstrating a wafer-scale gate-all-around transistor architecture using another 2D semiconductor, Bi2O2Se, with promising power efficiency.

Together, this body of work attracted significant industry attention, including two invited presentations at Intel and the Semiconductor Research Corporation in the U.S., the SCMP reported.

Traditional silicon chips are approaching fundamental physical limits, struggling to deliver performance gains at advanced 3-nanometer and sub-3nm nodes. Moore's Law, the longstanding trend of transistor counts doubling roughly every two years, is running into barriers that make continued scaling increasingly difficult.

Low-dimensional materials like InSe offer a potential way forward. With atomic-scale thickness and quantum effects, they can achieve performance that silicon cannot at extreme miniaturization.

Jiang's InSe devices outperform Intel's 3nm node technology in key metrics, including delay and energy-delay product, while achieving an internationally leading energy efficiency ratio, according to the National Natural Science Foundation of China.

"They not only possess almost all the functions of silicon but can surpass it in energy efficiency. Future chips may be smaller, faster and more energy-efficient, key drivers for advancing information technology," Jiang told DeepTech.

But he cautioned that the path from lab to factory is long.

"Transitioning from laboratory research to true industrialisation is, in my opinion, more likely to be a 10-year technological evolution process," he said.

As early as October last year, before Jiang had left the U.S., Peking University announced on its website that he was recruiting doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers. The notice said his lab would focus on advanced low-dimensional semiconductor electronics to address bottlenecks in 3D integrated devices and circuit architectures, aligned with national strategic needs in artificial intelligence, high-performance computing and autonomous driving.

In an interview with China Science Communication, Jiang cited his PhD adviser Peng Lianmao, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and dean of Peking University's School of Electronics, as an influence on his decision to return.

"To truly advance these new materials and devices closer to industrial application, a relatively stable and long-term research team is required," Jiang told DeepTech.

"Peking University has accumulated decades of research foundation in the field of low-dimensional electronics, so returning to Peking University to form my own team is an opportunity for me to conduct research systematically and sustainably."