Contact Information
1002 W. Green St.
Urbana, IL
Research Areas
Biography
Prof. Xin Liu received her B.S. in Physics from Tsinghua University in 2004 and her Ph.D in Astrophysical Sciences from Princeton University in 2010 under the guidance of Prof. Michael A. Strauss. Before joining UIUC in 2015, she was a NASA Einstein Fellow at Harvard and a Hubble Fellow at UCLA.
Research Interests
Astronomical survey and data science
Multi-messenger and time-domain astrophysics
AI for science
Research Description
Astronomy is entering an era where scientific discovery is increasingly limited not by the amount of data we collect, but by our ability to extract reliable physical information from it. We build physics-informed, uncertainty-aware, and trustworthy AI that embeds physical principles, symmetries, and probabilistic reasoning directly into modern machine learning, transforming AI from a black-box prediction tool into a rigorous framework for scientific inference. We develop methods for pixel-level analysis, probabilistic modeling, and interpretable scientific machine learning that maximize the information content of complex astronomical observations while providing robust uncertainty quantification and controlling systematic errors. Although our primary applications are in cosmology, the methodologies we develop are broadly applicable across astronomy and other data-intensive scientific disciplines.
Education
Ph.D., Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University, 2010
M.A., Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University, 2008
M.S., Physics, Tsinghua University, 2006
B.S., Physics, Tsinghua University, 2004
Awards and Honors
Norman P. Jones Professorial Scholar, 2023-2026
Excellent Teacher Ranked by Students, 2023
NCSA Faculty Fellow, 2020 & 2023
Additional Campus Affiliations
Professor, Astronomy
Professor, National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)
External Links
Recent Publications
Jiang, Y., Shen, Y., Liu, X., Zakamska, N., Zhuang, M. Y., Gross, A. C., Li, J., Chen, Y. C., & Ishikawa, Y. (2026). Galactic-scale Quasar Pairs from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and Gaia DR3. Astrophysical Journal, 998(1), Article 80. https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ae31eb
Kollmeier, J. A., Rix, H. W., Aerts, C., Aird, J., Alfaro, P. V., Almeida, A., Anderson, S. F., Arseneau, S. M., Assef, R. J., Aviram, S., Aydar, C., Badenes, C., Bandyopadhyay, A., Barger, K., Barkhouser, R. H., Bauer, F. E., Behmard, A., Bender, C., Besser, F., ... de J. Zermeño, R. (2026). Sloan Digital Sky Survey. V. Pioneering Panoptic Spectroscopy. Astronomical Journal, 171(1), Article 52. https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-3881/ae0576
Merz, G., Zhuang, M. Y., Li, J., Yang, Q., Shen, Y., Liu, X., & Crenshaw, J. F. (2026). PHOTOMETRIC REDSHIFTS IN JWST DEEP FIELDS: A PIXEL-BASED ALTERNATIVE WITH DEEPDISC. Open Journal of Astrophysics, 9. https://doi.org/10.33232/001c.156099
SDSS Collaboration (2026). The Nineteenth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Astrophysical Journal, Supplement Series, 285(1), Article 9. https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4365/ae4697
Chen, Y. C., Gross, A. C., Liu, X., Shen, Y., Zakamska, N. L., Hwang, H. C., & Zhuang, M. Y. (2025). Varstrometry for Off-nucleus and Dual Sub-Kpc AGN (VODKA): Long-slit Optical Spectroscopic Follow-up with Gemini/GMOS and Hubble Space Telescope/STIS. Astrophysical Journal, 988(1), Article 126. https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ade23b