Dr. Liu is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). She received her PhD from MIT EECS department, advised by professor David Gifford from Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Prior to joining the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, she spent an amazing year at the Institute for Protein Design as a postdoctoral researcher advised by professor David Baker. Her research develops multimodal, scalable, and geometry-aware deep generative models and sequential optimization techniques, as well as novel experiment frameworks and computational tools, for solving important problems in life sciences. She is especially interested in geometric DL and multi-modal flow matching & diffusion methods for computational design of functional and therapeutic molecules, including but not limited to antibody design, enzyme and catalyst design and drug discovery. Machine learning wise she works on geometry-aware multimodal flow matching/diffusion models, diffusion LLMs, sequential optimization and RL with generative priors, post-training and steering foundational generative models, active learning and model uncertainty. Her PhD thesis won the MIT EECS George M. Sprowls Ph.D. Thesis Award in AI and Decision-Making in 2021.
She received her bachelor degree from Tsinghua University EE department, where she worked as a research assistant in Machine Learning and Computational Biology Group (IIIS), advised by Prof. Jianyang Zeng. She was a visiting scholar at CMU in 2014 summer and worked in Murphy Lab, Lane Center for Computational Biology, advised by professor Robert F. Murphy.
Dr. Liu is actively recruiting students, so reach out to her if you’re interested in developing AI algorithms for life sciences!