Andrea J. Liu

Andrea Liu is a theoretical soft condensed matter physicist. She is best known for developing the field of jamming, which provides a unifying conceptual framework for understanding commonalities in systems ranging from atomic and molecular glasses, to colloidal glasses and granular matter. Liu was born in New York and grew up in Iowa. She received her AB degree in physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and her PhD in the area of critical phenomena from Cornell University in 1989. After switching to complex fluids during her postdoc at Exxon Research and Engineering Co., she worked on polymer theory as a postdoc in the Chemical Engineering, Materials Science and Physics departments at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She then joined the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she was a member of the physical chemistry faculty for ten years before moving to the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania in 2004, where she is now the Hepburn Professor of Physics.