Audrey Liu

Growing up in Northern Virginia, Audrey graduated from National Cathedral School (NCS) in Washington, DC, an all-girls school. There, she first developed an interest in engineering through Science Olympiad, where the girls came together to design, build, test, compete, and grow as a community. Fascinated by how new materials can be engineered to address real-world challenges, Audrey plans to major in applied physics at Columbia.

During her high school years, Audrey conducted research on reusable nanowire filtration materials that could replace disposable masks, working with mentors at Georgetown University. She learned established material design and synthesis techniques, fabricating prototype foams and testing their microstructure and filtration performance. As her experience grew, Audrey drew on her understanding of how nanoscale surface structures form during electrodeposition to explore whether controlling nanogranule size could improve both filtration efficiency and breathability. She tested this approach by incorporating uniformly sized nanoparticles into the foams and evaluating their resulting microstructures and filtration performance. Her work contributed to a new material-design strategy within the group’s broader effort to develop high-performance, reusable filtration materials. For this work, Audrey was awarded 1st Place at the 2025 DC STEM Fair and was a 2025 ISEF Finalist.

In addition, Audrey pursued an independent senior math project, guided by mentors from Georgetown University and NCS, using mathematical models and simulations to optimize the auxetic properties of materials. Auxetic materials become thicker when stretched, giving them potential applications in impact protection, energy absorption, and biomedicine. Her project examined how lattice geometry and material properties affect the strength and stability of this unusual deformation. The project earned Audrey 1st place awards from the Aerospace Corporation and the Melchizedek Education and Research Institute at the 2026 DC STEM Fair, as well as 2nd place High School Science Essay Award at the 2026 Robert H. Herndon Memorial Science Competition.

Outside of research, Audrey is an accomplished dancer, training in Chinese dance, ballet, and contemporary, earning numerous awards at the state and national levels as both a soloist and team captain. She also performed at national venues and local festivals, including the Kennedy Center, Wolf Trap, the Smithsonian, and embassies. For Audrey, dance is more than performance; it is a way to share, spark curiosity and appreciation, create moments of understanding, and bring people together.

At Columbia, Audrey is excited to continue exploring next-generation materials and to learn how advances in materials science could lead to applications ranging from more efficient electric vehicles to better medical imaging and protective equipment. She is also interested in exploring entrepreneurship and finance, particularly how technologies move from laboratory discoveries to real-world applications and how her engineering background and understanding of markets could inform investment decisions that support technological development.