Rate My Professor Andrea Liu

Andrea Liu is the Hepburn Professor of Physics in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania, where she joined the faculty in 2004 and assumed the endowed chair in 2011. She previously held positions at the University of California, Los Angeles, serving as Assistant Professor from 1993 to 1999, Associate Professor from 1999 to 2002, and Professor from 2002 to 2004 in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Liu earned her A.B. in physics with highest honors from the University of California, Berkeley in 1984 and her Ph.D. in physics from Cornell University in 1989. After her doctorate, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Exxon Research and Engineering Company from 1989 to 1991 and a Postdoctoral Associate at the University of California, Santa Barbara from 1991 to 1994. At Penn, she holds secondary appointments in the Department of Chemistry since 2010 and the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering since 2022. Since 2021, she has been the Founder and Director of the University of Pennsylvania Center for Soft and Living Matter.

Liu's research in Physics centers on theoretical and computational investigations of soft and living matter. Her group studies collective phenomena emerging at subcellular, cellular, and tissue levels in living matter, and in soft matter addresses jamming transitions, glassy dynamics, physical learning, and data science applications to strongly correlated many-body systems. She pioneered the jamming framework, elucidating rigidity in disordered solids such as glasses, foams, and granular materials, with broad impacts across materials science and biophysics. Key publications include "Force distributions near the jamming and glass transitions" by C. S. O’Hern, S. A. Langer, A. J. Liu, and S. R. Nagel (Physical Review Letters, 2001); "Identifying structural flow defects in disordered solids using machine learning methods" by E. D. Cubuk et al. (Physical Review Letters, 2015); and "Solids between the mechanical extremes of order and disorder" by C. P. Goodrich, A. J. Liu, and S. R. Nagel (Nature Physics, 2014). Liu has received the American Physical Society Leo P. Kadanoff Prize (2025), election to the National Academy of Sciences (2017), Simons Investigator in Theoretical Physics (2015-2025), fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2012), and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2010), among others. She serves on editorial boards including Physical Biology and Journal of Statistical Physics and various national committees.