Prof. Jifeng LIU

Deputy Director-General of NAOC

Deputy chair for the School of Astronomy and Space Sciences at UCAS

Dr. Liu is an astronomer with a wide range of interests from multi-wavelength studies of stars and compact objects to data-mining techniques, and has published more than 60 papers in Nature and other journals. Specifically, his group is working to address the following questions. 1) How does stellar variability change across HR diagram? and how does that affect exo-planet habitability? 2) Where are the millions of stellar black holes predicted for the Milky Way? 3) Are there intermediate mass black holes in, e.g., ultraluminous X-ray sources? 4) How do black holes accrete and radiate? 5) what is the maximum mass for neutron stars? What are the minimum/maximum mass for stellar black holes? 6) how can machine learning help astronomical research?

Dr. Liu is mainly an observer, and was the Principal Investigator for more than 30 observing programs with major astronomical facilities in the world, including Hubble Space Telescope, Chandra X-ray Observatory, XMM-Newton X-ray satellite, Kepler Satellite, Keck telescope, Gemini telescope, Magellan telescope, MMT telescope, GTC telescope, LAMOST, and many others.

Dr. Liu received his B.S and M.S degrees at Beijing University, and his Ph.D from University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He then moved to Harvard University first as a post-doc, then a Chandra fellow and later an astrophysicist. In 2010, he moved back to China and joined NAOC as a principal astronomer, and began to teach as a joint professor at University of Chinese Academy of Sciences. Prof Liu was appointed the deputy chair for the School of Astronomy and Space Sciences at UCAS in 2015, and elected the Deputy Director-General of NAOC in 2018.

Dr. Liu was awarded the Ralph B. Baldwin Prize by University of Michigan for his “scholarly research on ultraluminous X-ray sources”, and also awarded the highly competitive Chandra fellowship by NASA. After returning to China, Dr. Liu received the National Distinguished Young Researcher Award in 2014, the NCU-DELTA Young Astronomer Lecture Award in 2016, and the Ten-Thousand-Talent Award in 2018.