Julia Liu

Abstract

Julia Liu, a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Toren Finkel at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), seeks to discover the underlying connections behind the complicated behavior of biological organisms. She earned her AB in Physics at Princeton University, and a PhD in Biophysics at Harvard University. Julia was recently awarded a NHLBI Career Transition Award (K22), which she considers a privilege but also a promise she needs to fulfill to start her own lab. Julia Liu My parents are both engineers; my dad is currently a professor of engineering at the University of California, Irvine, while my mom works in geological sciences. My dad tried to get me interested in building machines, but I was drawn to biology because it’s so rich and alive. Growing up as an only child in California, I went out exploring in the neighborhood and digging up bugs to observe. I also like animals a lot, so there were times I wanted to be a vet. In undergrad, however, I ended up in the physics department because I enjoyed the classes and problem sets. There’s an elegance to physics; everything can be derived from simple laws. I think I owe a lot of that urge, to uncover the underlying principles behind complex phenomena, to growing up with my dad. For me, it’s the excitement of understanding how cells make decisions, for instance, in response to stress, and how we might manipulate the responses. In grad school, I became very interested in how a cell processes DNA damage signals and makes the decision to undergo cell cycle arrest, senescence, or apoptosis. In Galit Lahav’s laboratory at Harvard, I studied the …