Laura Na Liu is a professor at the Kirchhoff Institute for Physics at Universität Heidelberg, Germany. She received her PhD degree in physics at Universität Stuttgart in 2009, working on 3D complex plasmonics at optical frequencies. In 2010, she worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, and in 2011, she joined Rice University as a Texas Instruments Visiting Professor. At the end of 2012, she obtained a Sofja Kovalevskaja Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and became an independent group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. Liu joined Universität Heidelberg in 2015.

Her research interest is multidisciplinary: She works at the interface between nanoplasmonics, biology, and chemistry. Her group focuses on developing sophisticated and smart plasmonic nanosystems for answering structural biology questions as well as catalytic chemistry questions in local environments.

In her presentation at the 2018 Materials Research Society (MRS) Fall Meeting, Liu will discuss a diverse set of DNA-assembled plasmonic nanostructures according to their characteristic optical properties. She will also discuss the evolution from static to dynamic plasmonic systems along with the fast development of this interdisciplinary field.

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