Polymer For SUSTainability

Postdoc &  graduate student openings in (1) Sustainably Polymers and Recycling, (2) Polymer-Graphene Composites, and (3) Porous polymers and carbons.

Brief Bio:

Liu earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Zhejiang University (China) in 2005. In 2011, he received his doctorate in chemical engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (advisor, Dr. Paul F. Nealey). Before  defending his thesis, he worked at HGST, a Western Digital® company (California), to apply his findings on 15-nm block copolymer lithography in magnetic data storage in 2010. After completing his doctorate, he conducted postdoctoral research at Northwestern University (advisor, Dr. Chad A. Mirkin), where he was named an Outstanding Researcher in the International Institute for Nanotechnology. 

He joined the faculty of the Department of Chemistry and the Department of Chemical Engineering at Virginia Tech in Fall 2014. He is affiliated to the Department of Materials Science & Engineering. He is an affiliated professor of Virginia Tech's Nanoscience program in the Academy of Integrated Science. He is also affiliated to the Macromolecules Innovation Institute (MII), the Center for Soft Matter & Biological Physics, and the Virginia Tech Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology (VTSuN).

Liu holds more than twenty patents. Among them, three patents are assigned to Western Digital®, one licensed to Intel®, one licensed to Waves Audio, Ltd (Israel), and two assigned to Sabic Global Technologies B. V.. With an entrepreneurship spirit, he is interested in commercializing the technologies developed in his laboratory.

Reseach Interests:

polymers for energy and environmental sciences; functional carbon fibers; extreme-condition polymers; polymer recycling and upcycling