Dr. Liu received his medical degree and residency training in internal medicine in Beijing, China. He then earned his Ph.D. in human genetics from the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. He received his postdoctoral research training at the University of Michigan before moving in 1993 to NIH's National Center for Human Genome Research, renamed the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) in 1995.

He has remained at NHGRI - appointed initially as a senior staff fellow, then as a tenure track investigator and since 2001 as a tenured senior investigator. Dr. Liu has been the head of the Oncogenesis and Development Section in NHGRI since 1995. In May 2011, Dr. Liu was appointed as the deputy scientific director of NHGRI. The main focus of Dr. Liu's research over the years has been the mechanism of leukemia development at the molecular level, using genetic and genomic approaches.

Dr. Liu discovered that a CBFB-MYH11 fusion gene is the product of chromosome 16 inversion, a common chromosome abnormality in human acute myeloid leukemia. Using animal models, Dr. Liu has illustrated the importance of CBFB-MYH11 for leukemia development, and how this fusion gene works. His group has also made important discoveries regarding the normal functions of several important leukemia genes.