Anna Liu
Gravitational-Wave Astrophysicist and an incoming postdoc at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Department of Physics, Rm 315
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Welcome to my webpage! I’m Anna Liu (刘安娜), but my friends call me Ania, the Polish familiar form of my name. I am half-Polish half-Chinese. I am an incoming postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) from fall 2025.
I finished my PhD in Gravitational-Wave (GW) Physics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) in June 2025, specialising in gravitational-wave data analysis of compact binary signals. I developed a phenomenological GW lensing model and have contributed to ringdown analyses of GWs. I am a member of the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration, contributing to the Testing General Relativity and Lensing Groups.
Education:
- PhD Physics, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2021-2025
- MSc Astronomy & Astrophysics, KU Leuven, Belgium, 2021
- BA (Hons) Physics, University of Oxford, UK, 2018
Research Interest:
- Gravitational waves from binary black holes: data analysis and phenomenology
- Probing matter distribution in the Universe with gravitational-wave lensing
- Probing General Relativity with black-hole ringdown
Languages:
Polish (native), Mandarin Chinese (native), English (fluent), German (conversational), Dutch (conversational), Russian (conversational)
My mini world map

selected publications
- Exploring the hidden Universe: a novel phenomenological approach for recovering arbitrary gravitational-wave millilensing configurationsMonthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2023
- Millilensing induced systematic biases in parameterized tests of General Relativity2024