Oliver Liao Pigs have Dreams

Hey there! I'm Chengjiaao (Oliver) Liao — a pig with dreams, currently chasing them as a Ph.D. student in Biomedical Engineering and Mechanics at Virginia Tech, advised by Prof. Aiguo Han.

I spend my days teaching machines to "see" inside the human body — my research revolves around quantitative ultrasound, AI-enabled ultrasound imaging, and medical image analysis. I'm also easily nerd-sniped by deep learning, surgical AI, 3D reconstruction, and computational biomechanics.

Before landing in Blacksburg, I picked up my M.Sc. in Biomedical Engineering from the National University of Singapore, where I reconstructed surgical scenes and turbocharged CFD simulations (10,000x faster, no big deal) in Dr. Yueming Jin's and Dr. Hua Liang Leo's labs.

The journey started at Zhejiang University, where I dove into MRI-based brain imaging with Prof. Dan Wu, poking around hippocampal subfields to understand post-stroke dementia. I also had a detour at Alibaba Group, wrangling LLMs to evaluate medical dialogues for the Qwen Medical Foundation Model — turns out even AI needs a doctor's second opinion.

When I'm not debugging code or reading papers, you'll find me watching the NBA, hunting down good food, or playing saxophone (poorly but passionately). Check out my CV for the serious stuff and my publications for proof that I occasionally finish things.