Junwei Liu is a condensed matter physicist who received his PhD from Tsinghua University in 2014, followed by postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 2014 to 2017. He joined the Department of Physics at HKUST in 2017. Liu’s broad interests span traditional phenomena such as ferroelectricity and more exotic topological phases, including quantum spin Hall insulators. His current research focuses on two main areas: the study of novel topological phases of matter—particularly those related to symmetries—and their material realisations and experimental signatures; and the application of advanced machine learning techniques in physics, with emphasis on integrating these tools with quantum Monte Carlo simulations to explore complex quantum systems.