Biography | Lisa Su — Building 39, Where a UROP Became a Dissertation on SOI

People treat Lisa Su's three MIT degrees as a single line on a corporate biography.

The work sat in a specific laboratory building on Vassar Street.

She entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the fall of 1986 from the Bronx High School of Science.

She took a bachelor's, a master's in 1991, and a doctorate in electrical engineering in 1994.

MIT's own commencement coverage records that her first Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program assignment was in Hank Smith's lab in Building 39, making X-ray lithography mask blanks.

Building 39 is the Brown Building at 60 Vassar Street.

It is a six-story laboratory block from 1968, tied to Buildings 37 and 38 on the same street wall.

In February 2026 the Cambridge Historical Commission took a demolition filing for substantial destruction of this building.

A visitor in 2026 should check whether the 1968 block is still standing.

Her doctoral advisors were Dimitri A. Antoniadis and James E. Chung.

The 1994 dissertation, deposited in DSpace@MIT, is titled Extreme-submicrometer silicon-on-insulator (SOI) MOSFETs.

MIT Technology Review later described her as one of the early researchers to treat SOI as a way to put transistors on an insulating layer.

She left Cambridge for Texas Instruments in 1994.

The pin is Building 39, not the Great Dome and not a later AMD campus.

Photo: Beyond My Ken, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Maclaurin Buildings and Great Dome, 12 August 2017, used here as campus context for the Vassar Street labs. Portrait: Executive Office of the President, public domain, 2021.