Handan Liu

Handan Liu is a Teaching Professor in the Multidisciplinary Graduate Engineering Programs at Northeastern University, specializing in High-Performance Computing for AI, scalable machine learning, and large language models. With over 20 years of combined industry and academic experience, she integrates practical insights from her work at NASA, the US Air Force, and as a software engineer into her teaching and research.

Her educational background includes:

• Ph.D. from Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Dr. Liu's research centers on advancing AI through high-performance computing, with a focus on efficient scaling of large language models via quantization and parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT). She also explores reasoning capabilities, cognitive aspects, and multimodal learning to enhance AI systems. Her work bridges theoretical algorithms and real-world applications in distributed environments.

Her publication history shows an evolution from computational fluid dynamics and aerospace engineering (2008-2011) to biomedical applications (2008-2009), and now to AI and HPC (2014-2025). Recent work emphasizes educational integration of parallel computing in AI, reflecting her commitment to preparing students for industry demands.

No major scientific awards are listed in the provided information.

Dr. Liu mentors graduate students through course projects and research, developing unique curricula that merge HPC with AI. Her leadership in building Northeastern's HPC clusters since 2015 provides critical infrastructure for student research. Past collaborations with government agencies indicate a strong grant history, though current funding details are not specified.

She has been instrumental in establishing Northeastern University's HPC clusters, creating a robust computational environment that supports interdisciplinary research in engineering and data science.