Austin Liu

Hi, I’m Austin 👋

I explore problems in physics, machine learning, and computational biology.

I am a student researcher in Singapore. I captained Team Singapore to the 2025 IYPT world championship and represented Singapore at ISEF and IOAI. My newest research, 3DICE, explores interpretable machine learning for drug–target interaction prediction.

Portrait of Austin Liu

About

I like understanding why things work, especially when the answer involves a mix of theory, experiments, and computation. Outside research, I enjoy sharing physics with others and working on my clubs, communities such as Lumiere, and other random projects. I also invest in the secondary market, cook (with results published on FoodXiV), play badminton and the erhu, am currently trying to learn how to juggle, and spend more time than I probably should solving crossword puzzles.

Research

Bioinformatics / Drug Discovery Bioinformatics · 2026

3DICE: Interpretable 3D Cross-Modal Learning for Drug–Target Interaction Prediction

Published in Bioinformatics, 3DICE combines Uni-Mol and ESM-IF1 structural embeddings to model drug–protein relationships. It outperformed state-of-the-art models in accuracy, generalisability, and efficiency on DrugBank and KIBA, while highlighting influential atoms and protein residues for intrinsic interpretability.

Second Award in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics at Regeneron ISEF 2026.

Physics / Soft Robotics IYPT 2025

Comprehensive Analytical Modelling of Hysteretic Nonlinear Dynamics of a Pneumatic Air Muscle

Derived a superior nonlinear viscoelastic model for the McKibben Artificial Muscle that relieves over-reliance on black-box computational methods, modelling hysteresis.

8.00 points at IYPT, highest-scoring report.

Watch the presentation (opens in a new tab)
Physics / Fluid Dynamics IYPT 2025

Levitation of Liquid Layers via Dynamic Suppression of the Rayleigh–Taylor Instability and Associated Faraday Instability

Mapped the stability boundaries for vertically oscillated fluid layers levitating above air layers.

7.88 points at IYPT, second highest-scoring report.

Biology / Waste Processing 2023

Factors Affecting Hermetia illucens in Digesting Food Waste and Quality of Frass Produced

This study tested how temperature and food waste composition affect Black Soldier Fly Larvae (BSFL) digestion and the quantity/quality of frass produced, across three controlled experimental stages.

Projects

SJPO Training 2026

Lumiere

A free, student-led community helping students prepare for the Singapore Junior Physics Olympiad through weekly lessons, notes, problem sets, worked solutions, and peer support. Brought to you by Raffles Physics Club and NYSingularity.

Visit Lumiere (opens in a new tab)

Utilities & experiments

TimeSignature

An extremely accurate metronome, tuner, and tone generator that I actually use.

Affiliations

Representing Singapore

  • Regeneron ISEF 2026

    Delegate

  • IOAI 2026

    Team Singapore

  • IYPT 2025

    Captain, world champions

At Raffles

  • Raffles Physics Club

    Chairperson

  • RI Infocomm Club

    Competitive programming trainer

  • Raffles Entrepreneurs' Network

    Member