Andrea J. Liu Receives APS 2025 Leo P. Kadanoff Prize

Andrea J. Liu, Hepburn Professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy and Professor of Chemistry, has been awarded the 2025 Leo P. Kadanoff Prize from the American Physical Society. The Kadanoff Prize recognizes scientists whose theoretical, experimental, or computational achievements have opened new vistas for statistical and/or nonlinear physics.
 
Liu, who has been at Penn since 2004, was cited for “broad contributions to the statistical mechanics of disordered systems and biological matter, including the theory of jamming.” Her research uses a combination of analytical theory and computation to study soft and living matter. 
 
In living matter, the Liu Group is interested in how new and general collective phenomena, often beyond those typically observed in inanimate soft matter, can emerge at the subcellular, cellular, and tissue levels. In soft matter, the Group focuses on the glass problem, the learning problem, and in using data science methods to understand the microscopic origins of collective many-body behavior in strongly correlated systems.
 
Liu and collaborators have worked for several years on the problem of jamming, in which they showed that jamming produces solids at an opposite pole from perfect crystals, providing a new way of thinking about the nature of rigidity in disordered solids.