Assistant Professor, Harvard University
Prof. Liu has more than 15 years of experience in nanoelectronics and bioelectronics. He received his Ph.D. degree in Chemistry from Harvard University in 2014. He then worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University from 2015 to 2018. He joined Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences as an Assistant Professor in 2019. His laboratory at Harvard University is focusing on the development of soft bioelectronics, cyborg engineering, genetic/genomic engineering, and computational tools to address questions in brain-machine interface, neuroscience, cardiac diseases, and developmental disorders.
Dr. Liu has pioneered in bioelectronics where he has originated new paradigms that have defined the soft electronic materials and nanoelectronics architectures for “tissue-like electronics”, and their original applications for long-term stable brain-machine interface, high-density cardiac mapping, stem cell maturation, and multimodal spatial biology. His work has established some of the fundamental principles for current tissue- and brain-machine interfaces used in both academic research and industrial applications. He cofounded and served as scientific advisor of Axoft, Inc., a brain-machine interface company.
Dr. Liu’s work has been cited by Science as milestones in bioelectronics in 2013 and 2017, and awarded as Most Notable Chemistry Research and Top 10 World-Changing Ideas in 2015. Dr. Liu’s independent career has been recognized by recent awards, including a 2022 Young Investigator Program (YIP) Award from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), a 2021 NIH/NIDDK Catalyst Award from the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award Program, a 2020 William F. Milton Award, and a 2019 Aramont Award for Emerging Science Research Fellowship.
Soft and flexible bioelectronics for brain-machine interface
Large-scale brain mapping via brain-machine interface is important for deciphering neuron population dynamics, understanding and alleviating neurological disorders, and building advanced neuroprosthetics. Ultimately, brain mapping aims to simultaneously record activities from millions, if not billions, of neurons with single-cell resolution, millisecond temporal resolution and cell-type specificity over the time course of brain development, learning, and aging. In this talk, I will first introduce “tissue-like” soft bioelectronics that possess tissue-like properties, capable of tracking the electrical activities from the same neurons in the brain of behaving animals. Specifically, I will discuss the fundamental limits to the electrochemical impedance stability of soft electronic materials in bioelectronics and introduce our strategies to overcome these limits, enabling a scalable platform for the large-scale brain mapping. Then, I will discuss the building of “cyborg organisms”, where stretchable mesh-like electrode arrays are embedded in 2D sheets of stem/progenitor cells and reconfigured through 2D-to-3D organogenesis, enabling continuous 3D brain electrophysiology during brain development. Finally, I will discuss future perspectives that leverage the soft bioelectronics-brain interface to integrate single-cell spatial transcriptomics with electrical recording, opening opportunities for cell-type-specific brain mapping and functional brain cell atlas.
Assistant Professor, Harvard University