Dr Liu received her BEng (Hon, first class) in 2010 and PhD in Engineering (Photovoltaics) in 2015, both from the ANU. She has since worked as a research fellow in the solar PV group at School of Engineering, ANU. She was awarded an ACAP Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in 2018. She received the Ulrich Goesele Young Scientist Award in 2022 (link).

Dr Liu's research focuses on improving the performance and cost-effectiveness of the solar PV technology through understanding, and in turn engineering, the impurities and defects in silicon solar cells. In more recent years, Dr Liu and her team are working on discovering and unravelling the gettering (impurity removal) effects and mechanisms associated with the commonly used dielectric thin films (silicon nitride and aluminium oxide, for example) and the state-of-the-art polysilicon-based passivating contacts in silicon solar cells. Her team is also actively working on defect characterisation in semiconductor materials to understand their behaviour and impact.