Author: Sandi Miller | Department of Physics<\/p>\n
Since he was young, Chih-Wei Joshua Liu\u00a0\u201922 always knew he wanted to be a \u201cphysician-scientist,\u201d pursuing research at the intersection of basic science and medicine.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cGrowing up, I wanted to do work that concretely helps people,\u201d says Liu. \u201cI also wanted to further our understanding of the universe. Physics describes how nature behaves. From equations, we can derive behavior. In biology and medicine, this behavior is extremely complex. I\u2019ve always wondered how these sciences combine: If we can put nature\u2019s beautiful complexity in the language of mathematics, then the world makes sense.\u201d<\/p>\n
As the son of a physician \/ computational biologist, he was exposed early on to a life in research. His family moved from Taipei to Dallas, Texas, and the San Francisco Bay Area before returning to Taiwan during his high school years, when his father joined the faculty at Taiwan\u2019s National Health Research Institutes.<\/p>\n
He competed in the Biology Olympiad while at the National Experimental High School, an international school run by the Taiwanese government for foreign-raised children of Hsinchu Science Park employees. Hsinchu Science Park centers on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which was founded by MIT Corporation board member Morris Chang \u201952, SM \u201953, ME \u201955.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople at my high school think of MIT as a place where you can make a difference in the world,\u201d Liu says. Drawn to the Institute, both Liu and his twin brother, Chih-Lun Julian, applied to MIT. His brother was then more interested in computational linguistics, while he was drawn to biochemistry and computational biology.<\/p>\n
\u201cMuch of the most important research in condensates has been at MIT,\u201d he says. \u201cI started going to a biomolecular condensate journal club in my first semester as a freshman and realized that, to really understand condensates, I needed statistical thermodynamics. I was disappointed to learn I couldn\u2019t get very far without physics.\u201d<\/p>\n
Having struggled with high school physics, he was apprehensive about the Institute’s physics General Institute Requirements (GIRs). \u201cWhen I took 8.01 with Professor Kiyoshi Masui<\/a>, I realized that MIT physics \u2014 especially the world-famous TEAL [Technology-Enhanced Active Learning] format used for 8.01 and 8.02 \u2014 is quite different from multiple-choice AP physics.\u201d<\/p>\n With a strong grasp of Newtonian mechanics, he pushed himself to take the more challenging follow-up class, 8.022 (Physics II: Electricity and Magnetism). From there, he surprised himself by declaring his major as physics.<\/p>\n \u201cThe physics GIRs pushed me to branch out academically. I TA’d 8.01 my sophomore year and enjoyed helping other students develop skills and interests in physics.\u201d<\/p>\n He shifted away from biomolecular condensates and pursued research in other areas of biophysics, beginning with work on an experimental evolution approach to engineering microbiome therapeutics with Professor Jeff Gore<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cA long-standing goal in medicine is the ability to tailor microbes to patients\u2019 specific metabolic needs; outside microbes with potentially useful functions don\u2019t usually survive when inserted into patients\u2019 microbiomes,\u201d he says. \u201cWe evolved bacteria isolated from the human gut to degrade the compound that causes kidney stones. I found this project exciting because we used mathematical modeling to control the evolutionary trajectory of bacteria in the lab, as well as to engineer something that could have real medical applications.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2020, he began working with Professor Nikta Fakhri<\/a> on machine-learning approaches for measuring entropy production in biological systems.<\/p>\n \u201cPhysicists believe time irreversibility is a key property of life; biological processes irrevocably increase the entropy of the universe,\u201d he says. \u201cHowever, it\u2019s difficult to actually measure irreversibility. We are using a new machine-learning algorithm to do exactly this. Rho GTPases are a conserved cell-division regulator in almost all animals, including humans and the starfish we use experimentally. Using our neural network, we have quantitatively measured the arrow of time in this crucial biological system; Rho is implicated in cancer, among other diseases.\u201d<\/p>\n He presented this work at the March Meeting of the American Physical Society<\/a>, and plans to soon submit a joint first-author manuscript for review.<\/p>\n Supporting mental wellness<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cI know a lot of people who have struggled with mental health issues,\u201d he says. \u201cMIT is a pretty stressful place, and a lot of people struggle when they get here. This is an issue I really wanted to get involved in.\u201d<\/p>\n This drew him to the pressing problems of mental health on and off campus.<\/p>\n During the pandemic, he joined the MIT Wellbeing Ambassadors<\/a> to distribute Covid-19 guidelines and personal protective equipment to students remaining on campus during the pandemic. As president of Active Minds<\/a> and Peer Ears<\/a>, he led the merger of MIT\u2019s two mental-wellness peer-education groups, and worked with MIT\u2019s Office of Student Wellbeing<\/a> and clinicians at Student Mental Health and Counseling Services<\/a> to provide undergraduate students and organizations with active listening training.<\/p>\n Last summer, as a PKG Social Impact Intern<\/a> at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Department of Psychiatry, he used instant smartphone surveys to track time use in people with schizophrenia-spectrum and bipolar-spectrum disorders. By analyzing the data, he saw the emergence of the effects of race and socioeconomic status on functioning in people with severe mental illnesses, which he is writing about for the journal Clinical Psychological Science<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u201cI hope my work will help future psychiatrists address racial and socioeconomic inequities in caring for people with severe mental illnesses,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n In his second project for MGH, he used instant smartphone surveys to track hallucinations and metacognitive processes in people with schizophrenia. \u201cAnalyzing this data, we were able to substantiate a connection between metacognitive errors and hallucinations in people with schizophrenia,\u201d he says. That manuscript will be submitted in June.<\/p>\n For his own method of stress release, in his first year he shared his love of post-hardcore punk rock with a 2 a.m. show on WMBR<\/a>, until he realized it didn\u2019t work with his schedule. He is president of MIT\u2019s Society of Physics Students<\/a>, which organizes events for Course 8 undergraduates such as study breaks, movie nights, and the annual PRISM research conference<\/a>. He has served on the Physics Values Committee<\/a>, a departmental committee of faculty, staff, and students working together to improve underrepresented-student recruitment to MIT physics, and to support more inclusive faculty advising.<\/p>\n He was also community service chair and associate member educator at his fraternity, Phi Kappa Theta<\/a>. As community service chair, he sourced 12,000 face masks from the Taiwanese government during the 2020 U.S. mask shortage and organized a fundraiser to purchase these masks and donate them to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. \u201cIt has been one of my defining experiences at MIT,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Liu is also an avid hiker and likes to visit area tide pools to study marine invertebrates.<\/p>\n Next stop: Research and MD-PhD<\/strong><\/p>\n He is applying to MD-PhD programs to pursue research at the intersection of biostatistics and statistical mechanics. In the meantime, he will continue his research in Fakhri\u2019s group, studying recently identified \u201cnon-reciprocal\u201d phases of matter in drug-resistant bacteria.<\/p>\n As a future physician-physicist, Liu hopes to apply the mathematical techniques he picked up in his physics classes to help those struggling with mental health issues.<\/p>\n \u201cI hope to apply fundamental physics to the pressing problems of human health,\u201d he says. \u201cNon-equilibrium thermodynamics has recently proven its potential in fundamental biology. I believe the same theoretical framework might be just as insightful in translational medicine.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Go to Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Author: Sandi Miller | Department of Physics Since he was young, Chih-Wei Joshua Liu\u00a0\u201922 always knew he wanted to be a \u201cphysician-scientist,\u201d pursuing research at […] Read More<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":457,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aiproblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5671"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aiproblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aiproblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aiproblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aiproblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5671"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.aiproblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5671\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aiproblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/470"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aiproblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aiproblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aiproblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}