Jun Liu

Liu Jun (刘军, born 1965) is one of the world's leading statisticians who returned to China full-time in 2025 after nearly three decades at Harvard University, joining Tsinghua University as Xinhua Distinguished Chair Professor in the Department of Statistics and Data Science. He grew up on the Tsinghua University campus where his father taught, and earned his BS in Mathematics from Peking University in 1985.

At Harvard, Liu made pioneering contributions to Bayesian statistical inference, Monte Carlo methods, computational biology, and machine learning. He won the COPSS Presidents' Award in 2002 and the Morningside Gold Medal in Applied Mathematics in 2010, and is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences. He spent nearly a decade at Stanford before returning to Harvard as a tenured professor in 2000.

Liu cited a "love for education and scientific research as well as a sense of patriotism" as motivations for his return. The Trump administration's freezing of Harvard's research funding in April 2025 also contributed to his decision. He had been a visiting professor at Tsinghua since 2005 and helped establish its Center for Statistical Science in 2015.