Daniel Liu

Scientific visualization, history of biology, scientific publication and communication, scientific disciplines, historical instruments and material culture, history of physical chemistry, history of genetics, history of HIV/AIDS research

• 2017 McDonnell Scholar, Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Massachusetts
• 2020 Everett Mendelsohn Prize, for the best article published in the Journal of the History of Biology in the preceding three years, for “The Cell and Protoplasm as Container, Object, and Substance, 1835–1861.”
• Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) “Eigene Stelle” research grant, 2021–24.
• 2024 Deutsches Museum Publication Prize, for three articles on the history of biological microscopy: “The Schema and Organization of the Cell” in JHB (vol. 57, no. 2), published together with an annotated translation of Ernst Brücke’s “The Elementary Organisms,” and “Confronting the Limits of Optical Interpretation,” in the volume Milieus of Minutiae, eds. Elizabeth Brogden and Christiane Frey.

Daniel Liu is a historian of science, medicine, and technology. His current research explores the history of cell biology’s first century, showing how cell biology, microbial taxonomy, and ideas of “living matter” co-evolved with changing techniques in microscopy and visualization of microscopic objects. He is also working on a global history of lactose intolerance, in collaboration with Lisa Onaga, Christina Warinner, Matthäus Rest, and Soraya de Chadarevian. 

Dr. Liu’s prior work at UIUC was as an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Humanities Research Institute (HRI), working under Prof. Samantha Frost’s Biohumanities initiative in 2016–18. He has also been a Fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, a Visting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte (Dept. III Schäfer), and a consultant for Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s department of Library & Archives. His most recent position prior to joining the iSchool was as a DFG-sponsored postdoctoral research associate at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Lehrstuhl für Wissenschaftsgeschichte.

Liu, D. (2026). “Why is this journal called Protoplasma? A history of protoplasm theory and the divisions in cell biology before 1926,” Protoplasma, doi:10.1007/s00709-026-02158-1.

Liu, D. (2024. “The Schema and Organization of the Cell: An Introduction to Ernst Brücke’s Die Elementarorganismen(1861),” Journal of the History of Biology 57, no. 2: 281–304, doi:10.1007/s10739-024-09774-8.

Brücke, E. “The Elementary Organisms,” trans. Daniel Liu (2024, JHB 57, no. 2: 305–30, doi:10.1007/s10739-024-09773-9.

Liu, D. (2024) “Confronting the Limits of Optical Interpretation: Some Philosophical Considerations of Microscopic Details,” in Milieus of Minutiae: Contextualizing the Small in Literature, Philosophy, and Science, ed. Elizabeth Brogden and Christiane Frey (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press), 122–48.

Liu, D., Riggi, M., Lee, H., Currie, S., Goodsell, D., Iwasa, J., Rog, O. (2023). “Depicting a Cellular Space Occupied by Condensates.” Molecular Biology of the Cell 34, no. 10, doi:10.1091/mbc.E22-11-0519.

Liu, D. (2019). “The Artificial Cell, the Semipermeable Membrane, and the Life That Never Was, 1864–1901,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 49, no. 5: 504–55, doi:10.1525/hsns.2019.49.5.504.

Liu, D. (2018). “Heads and Tails: Molecular Imagination and the Lipid Bilayer, 1917–1941,” in Visions of Cell Biology: Reflections Inspired by Cowdry’s General Cytology, ed. Karl Matlin, Jane Maienschein, and Manfred Laubichler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 209–45.

Liu, D. (2017). “The Cell and Protoplasm as Container, Object, and Substance, 1835–1861,” JHB 50, no. 4: 889–925, doi:10.1007/s10739-016-9460-9.