Dr. Liu received his Degree of Veterinary Medicine and Master Degree at National Taiwan University (NTU).  During the Master's degree, he focused on Veterinary Surgery and tissue preservation during transplantation.  He received his Ph.D. program (2007) in Comparative Biomedical Sciences at North Carolina State University for his study on the role of heparan sulfate proteoglycan in the extracellular matrix in neural degeneration and development.  As a postdoctoral researcher, he studied the spinal neural regeneration in lampray model at University of Pennsylvania.  In 2009, Dr. Liu joined Department of Animal Science and Technology, National Taiwan University as an Assistant Professor and continued to study embryonic development, injury response and regeneration.

Our research focuses on the molecular mechanisms of development and regeneration of animal organ and functional tissues. Every individual of vertebrate animals is initially developed from one fertilized oocyte. In the progress of the embryonic development, cells in the embryos respond to various kinds of regulatory factors and hence proliferate, differentiate, migrate or adhere with other cells to give rise to the architecture of our body. Most of the cells in the emrbyos are fully differentiated and turned into part of the developed organ and functional tissue. However, few of the cells that stay not fully differentiated (also known as "stem cells") act as the source that provides new cells for physiological tissue renewal (AKA homeostasis). Those stem cells respond to the regulatory factors generated from tissue damage and hence stem cells can proliferate, differentiate, migrate and adhere with other cells to repair the damaged tissue. Some parts of our body, such as spinal cord and heart, possess less potential to regenerate and we currently have limited therapeutic measure due to the limited knowlege on regenerative medicine. Zebrafish model is an excellent platform for this end, as it is easy to create personalized genetic sequence with the modern genome editing tools, and zebrafish has excellent regenerative ability for comparative study.  We wish to expand our knowlege in this field by studying the molecular mechanisms of embryonic development, traumatic response of the tissues and stem cell biology so that hopefully one day we will be able to regenerate organs or functional tissues when we need to.