Background
Liu"s parents immigrated to the United States from China and met in graduate school at University of California, Los Los Angeles His father is an aerospace engineer His mother is a retired physics professor at U. C. Riverside.
Liu"s parents immigrated to the United States from China and met in graduate school at University of California, Los Los Angeles His father is an aerospace engineer His mother is a retired physics professor at U. C. Riverside.
While in high school he finished second in the 1990 national Westinghouse Science Talent Search. Liu received his Doctor of Philosophy from University of California Berkeley in 1999, supervised by Peter G. Schultz. Immediately after receiving his Doctor of Philosophy, Liu became assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard, in 1999.
Liu is a graduate of Riverside Poly High School. He received a Bachelor of Arts in chemistry from Harvard in 1994, graduating summa cum laude and 1st out of 1,641 students. While an undergraduate, he worked in the synthetic chemistry laboratory of Nobel Laureate East.J. Corey.
He was promoted to associate professor in 2003, and to full professor in 2005, at which time he also became a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator.
He was honored as a Harvard College Professor in 2007, in part for his undergraduate teaching. His introductory life sciences course, beginning in 2005, became Harvard"s largest natural sciences course.
Liu"s research group developed deoxyribonucleic acid-templated organic synthesis (DTS), a technique to translate deoxyribonucleic acid sequences into synthetic small molecules, rather than proteins, and applied DTS to the discovery of bioactive small molecules and new chemical reactions. The group also developed methods for using deoxyribonucleic acid templates for the synthesis of new polymers with tailor-made properties, as well as methods for using "supercharged" proteins of unusually high Netto charge to deliver macromolecules into mammalian cells in vitro and in vivo.
Liu was in 2008-2009 a member of the Defense Science Study Group. He is a member of the JASON Advisory Group.