Peng Liu received his B.S. degree from Peking University in 2003 and M.Sc. degree from the University of Guelph in 2006. He completed his Ph.D. at UCLA in 2010 under the guidance of Professor Kendall N. Houk. His graduate studies focused on the computational studies of transition metal catalyzed cycloaddition and reductive coupling reactions. From 2010–2014, he was a postdoctoral scholar of Professor Houk’s group at UCLA, where he performed computational research in various areas of organic chemistry, including C–H bond functionalization, olefin metathesis, organocatalysis, organic nanomaterials, and enzyme catalysis. He joined the faculty at the Department of Chemistry, University of Pittsburgh in September 2014. Since 2015 he has been an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering. He is currently a member of the Pitt Computational Modeling and Simulation program and the Pittsburgh Quantum Institute.
     In the past four years, the Liu research group has published over 50 papers in the area of computational organic chemistry, including both collaborative and independent computational studies. Liu’s research accomplishments have been recognized by a number of awards, including the NSF CAREER award in 2017, the Journal of Physical Organic Chemistry Award for Early Excellence in 2018, and the NIH Maximizing Investigators' Research Award (MIRA) in 2018. His research is currently supported by the NSF, NIH, ONR, and the University of Pittsburgh Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation.