Yi-Kai Liu is Co-Director of QuICS, an Adjunct Associate Professor in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) and a staff scientist in the Applied and Computational Mathematics Division at the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST). Liu's research centers on quantum computation, in particular, quantum algorithms and complexity, quantum state tomography and cryptography. He also works on related topics in compressed sensing and machine learning. He received his doctorate in computer science from the University of California, San Diego in 2007.