Andrea Liu


Andrea Jo-Wei Liu is the Hepburn Professor of Physics at the University of Pennsylvania, where she holds a joint appointment in the Department of Chemistry. She is a theoretical physicist studying condensed matter physics and biophysics. She is particularly known for her study of jamming, a phenomenon in which disordered materials become rigid with increasing density and stress. She is a Simons Investigator and Simons Fellow in Theoretical Physics, fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Academic career

Liu graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1984, and earned a Ph.D. in 1989 from Cornell University under the supervision of Michael Fisher. After postdoctoral studies at Exxon and the University of California, Santa Barbara, she joined the faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1993, and moved to the University of Pennsylvania in 2004. She became the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor in the Natural Sciences in 2009, before becoming the Hepburn Professor in 2011.
Liu was the General Councilor of the American Physical Society. She served on the steering committees for a number of scientific organizations including the APS Board of Directors, the National Science Foundation Committee of Visitors for the Division of Materials Research, the NAS Biophysics Decadal Study Committee, and the National Research Council Condensed Matter and Materials Research Committee.

Research contributions

Liu is recognized for distinguished contributions in theoretical physics, particularly for demonstrating that slow relaxation in soft materials can be viewed within a common framework called jamming." She was one of the first scientists to uncover the structural and dynamical features of the jamming transition, a critical phase transition that marks the onset of rigidity in disordered packings. She has also resolved a longstanding question of how disordered solids flow by identifying "flow defects", or regions that are vulnerable to local rearrangement, analogous to dislocations in crystals.
According to Google Scholar, Liu's publications have received over 23,000 citations and her h-index is 74.

Awards and honors

Liu has received a significant number of awards and honors which include: