Congratulations to Professor Chong Liu on his promotion to associate professor with tenure, effective July 1, 2023.
Professor Chong Liu joined the UCLA Chemistry & Biochemistry faculty in 2017 as an assistant professor and he holds the Jeffrey and Helo Zink Endowed Professional Development Term Chair in Chemistry.
Liu received his bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Fudan University, China, where he synthesized mesoporous materials with Professor Dongyuan Zhao. He then pursued his graduate research at University of California, Berkeley, working with Professor Peidong Yang, receiving his Ph.D. in chemistry. After which Liu continued his career as Lee Kuan Yew postdoctoral fellow sponsored by Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Working together with Professor Daniel Nocera at Harvard University and Professor Pamela Silver at Harvard Medical School, he combined the strengths of biology and inorganic chemistry, and developed inorganic/bio hybrid systems of solar-driven CO2 and N2 fixation with the efficiencies higher than natural counterparts.
The Liu group at UCLA develops electrochemistry-enabled microenvironments for catalysis and microbiology. Combining the expertise in electrochemistry, nanomaterials and machine learning, the Liu group has three unique research thrusts under such as an overarching theme: (1) Design the extracellular microenvironments and materials-microorganism interfaces for biocatalysis and microbiology; (2) Develop catalytic systems with microscopic spatial control using electrochemistry and nanomaterials; (3) Applying machine-learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) in electrochemistry and nanomaterials. Those three multidisciplinary thrusts are synergistically interconnected, highlighting the interdisciplinary nature of the Liu group.
In 2017, Liu was named by Science News as one of 10 exceptional young scientists. More recently he has received multiple awards and honors including an NSF Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Award; the UCLA Alpha Chi Sigma (AXΣ) Glenn T. Seaborg Award; an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship; 2020 Innovator under 35 of China, MIT Technology Review; and Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) from National Institute of General Medical Science.
Penny Jennings, UCLA Chemistry & Biochemistry, penny@chem.ucla.edu.
