Maijia Liao
Affiliated Faculty, Bioengineering
Assistant Professor, Physics
Research Focus
Quantitative Neuroscience, Cell Mechanics, Cytoskeleton in Neurons, Biotransport, Advanced Imaging Method, Physics of Living Matter
About
Maijia Liao, Ph. D., is an experimental biophysicist. She joined the Northeastern Physics department in January 2024 as an assistant professor.
Originally from Jiangsu, China, she obtained her B.S. degree from Nanjing University, with undergraduate research experience in developing photoelectrode against photo-corrosion. In 2011, she switched to the field of soft matter physics and pursued Ph.D. degree in the Department of Physics at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, working on grain-boundary phase transitions and electrokinetics in colloidal systems.
In 2017, she stumbled into biophysics as postdoctoral research in the Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry department at Yale. She studied neuronal morphologies with an interdisciplinary approach. With new imaging techniques and creative data analysis, she discovered new geometrical and topological scaling laws which governs the neuronal morphologies.
At Northeastern, she will decipher the mysterious principles governing neuronal structures and functions.
Honors & Awards
Maijia received the prestigious Career Award at the Scientific Interface from Burroughs Wellcome Fund in 2022.
Research Overview
Quantitative Neuroscience, Cell Mechanics, Cytoskeleton in Neurons, Biotransport, Advanced Imaging Method, Physics of Living Matter
Research in the Liao laboratory combines single-molecule imaging, genetic manipulation, whole-cell super-resolution microscopy, machine learning, and physical modeling to understand how neuron structures and functions emerge from the elementary molecular processes, under both normal development and pathological stresses.
Our favorite model system is Drosophila which has 75% of human disease-causing genes. The Drosophila larva is translucent, which facilitates optical imaging of cellular dynamics within the entire living organism and opens opportunities for precise spatial and temporal perturbations using light.
We are interested in intriguing questions, such as: How do neuronal cytoskeletons arrange themselves to constitute branched structures? How do the neurons ensure that materials and energy are supplied throughout this structure to the places where it is needed? How do neurons respond to mutations, external environments, and experiences?
Ultimately, our goal is to discover fundamental physical principles underlying these questions and shed light on why aberrant neuronal morphologies are associated with diseases or experience-induced impairments. These findings may subsequently be translated into new medical therapies.