Dr. Liu was Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Psychiatry, and Public Health at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He previously held positions as Chairman of the Department of Sociology; Associate Dean of Arts and Letters of the College of Arts and Letters; and Director of the Center for the Study of Man at the University of Notre Dame before joining the Faculty at the University of Illinois and served as National Director of the Pacific/Asian Mental Health Research Centre. He also taught at the University of Portland, the University of San Carlos in the Philippines, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of California , San Diego.
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In 1989, he became the Dean of Social Science Faculty at new government status Hong Kong Baptist University, where he also founded the Center for East-West Studies. In 1992, he taught at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology where he retired to help with Lingnan College in seeking a government status of a new university until 1997. He was invited to become a Visiting Senior Fellow at the East Asian Institute of the National University of Singapore in 1998.
Born in Nanjing China, he spent his childhood and adolescent days in Chongqing. He went to the United States for his college education in Minnesota. After completing his doctoral work in Sociology, he did post-doctoral training in Social Psychology and Demography at University of Chicago; and in Psychiatric Epidemiology at Yale University.
During his some forty years of academic life, Dr. Liu was also active in both national and local community services. He was on the national Board of Directors of Planned Parenthood/World Population as well as several other national organizations. While teaching at the University of Notre Dame, he served on boards of local social welfare and charitable organizations in South Bend and St. Joseph County. In Chicago, he was the first Asian American ever to be appointed to the 150-year old Chicago Board of Education. He also served on the panel of the President's Commission of Mental Health of Carter's White House, and later on the Public Committee of Mental Health organized by Mrs. Roselyn Carter.
Dr. Liu also did fieldwork in Mexico, United States, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and the Philippines. In 1967, he organized a bi-national team to study the effect of kinship structure on high fertility in the Philippines. In 1985, he organized another bi-national team to study the prevalence of psychiatric illness in Shanghai. In 1987, the same team had invited researchers at the University of California in San Diego to study Alzeheimer's Disease in China. He is a proflic writer, including two monographs, 12 edited volumes, and more than 125 articles in journals in sociology, psychology, psychiatry, neurology, medicine and political science. His latest work on the Chinese society entitled The Modernization of China and Chinese Catholic Church in Metamorphosis to be published by the Cambridge University Press.
Dr. Liu passed away on October 10, 2008. He was 78. Dr. Liu is survived by his wife, Dr. Elena Yu, Professor in Public Health at San Diego State University, now live in La Jolla, California, a son Edwin (Rosa), two daughters, Adeline (Rick) and Beatrice (Randy).