Dr. Liu's research interests are in paleoclimatology, climatic change and variability, Quaternary palynology and paleoecology, biogeography, and lake sedimentation. He has been the principal investigator of numerous research projects funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), NOAA, National Geographic Society, Louisiana's 8g Education Quality Support Fund, and the Risk Prediction Initiative (RPI) of the Bermuda Biological Station for Research. He has published on a wide range of topics including the Quaternary environmental history of the boreal forest of Canada, the tropical rain forest of the Amazon Basin, the Yangtze River delta of China, the Tibetan Plateau, the pollen history of Peruvian and Tibetan ice cores, and the hurricane history of the Gulf of Mexico coast. During the past ten years he has pioneered the field of paleotempestology, or specifically the use of coastal lake-sediment proxy records for reconstructing the history of catastrophic hurricane landfalls along the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf coasts.