Chemistry’s Guoliang Liu honored with Blackwood Junior Faculty Fellowship
Guoliang “Greg” Liu
Guoliang “Greg” Liu, an assistant professor in the Virginia Tech Department of Chemistry, has been awarded the Blackwood Junior Faculty Fellowship of Life Sciences by the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors.
The award was approved at the Aug. 25-26 meeting of the Board of Visitors. The fellowship was established in the College of Science through a donation from Mary Nolen Blackwood ’73 and Willis P. Blackwood ’72 to provide support for a leading faculty member who holds the rank of assistant or associate professor, to forward the advancement of the life sciences with a complementary focus on the development of business and/or entrepreneurial opportunities.
Liu was nominated for the three-year fellowship by College of Science Dean Sally C. Morton, concurring with the recommendation of the College of Science Honorifics Committee.
Liu's efforts to use extremely thin layers of fibers known as nanofibers to cover windows in buildings and cars in a multiprong effort to cut energy consumption and reduce the often bright, blinding glare of the sun earned Liu a five-year, $585,000 National Science Foundation CAREER Award. He also won a 2017 Air Force Young Investigator Program Award and a 2018 American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Foundation Doctoral New Investigator Award.
His research earned him “emerging investigator” or “young talent” designations from specialty journals Macromolecular Rapid Communications, Polymer Chemistry, Journal of Materials Chemistry, and Molecular Systems Design & Engineering. His numerous projects have attracted more than $4 million in funding. He has more than 50 publications in nanoscience, chemistry, and engineering journals and holds 16 patents, many of which are licensed and practiced in industry.
Liu is a core member of the Academy of Integrated Science’s nanoscience degree program in the College of Science and a member of the Macromolecules Innovation Institute. He has guided nine graduate and 22 undergraduate students on research projects, including Assad Khan, who was named the 2019 Graduate Student of the Year.
He joined Virginia Tech in 2014 after earning a bachelor’s degree from Zhejiang University in 2005 and a doctoral degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2011, both in chemical engineering.
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