Dean Mingyan Liu
Mingyan Liu has served as the Robert J. Vlasic Dean of Engineering at the University of Michigan since May 15, 2026. She is the seventeenth dean of the University of Michigan College of Engineering.
Liu is also T. C. Chang Professor of Engineering and professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan.
Commitment and mission
As dean, Liu is committed to serving the community, colleagues, and students, and helping to set key agenda items for the future of public higher education. With more than 160 years of engineering education and transformative research, sustained by our dynamic community, Michigan Engineering educates visionary leaders and advances bold discoveries to shape a better world.
Research expertise and commercialization
Liu is an internationally recognized expert in sequential decision and learning theory, game theory, and incentive mechanisms. Her research generally falls within the context of large-scale networked systems.
In recent years, Liu’s work has increasingly focused on cybersecurity—combining large-scale internet measurement data with machine learning to quantify cyber risk, and applying game and contract theory to develop incentive mechanisms that encourage stronger security behavior in complex, multi-stakeholder environments.
Liu co-founded QuadMetrics, Inc., which commercialized the U-M-developed technology for predictive cybersecurity analytics and resulted in the first global enterprise cybersecurity ratings system. QuadMetrics was acquired by the analytics software company Fair Isaac (FICO) in 2016. The technology is now being used as a risk management tool by companies spanning sectors from banking to automotive, and as an underwriting tool by major insurance companies around the world. It has also become part of an ESG (Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance) rating for institutional investors. For this, she received the “Crossing the Valley of Death” PI Excellence Award from the Department of Homeland Security in 2016.
From 2005 to 2014, she was part of a NASA project that used in-situ sensing techniques to measure and collect fine-grained soil moisture data in real time, and served as the lead on the instrumentation of the sensor network. This work led to the development and deployment of a soil moisture sensing network in Oklahoma in 2010 and California in 2011-2021. These are the first-ever large-scale soil moisture sensor networks deployed in an open field; they are also among the first of outdoor deployments.
Major leadership roles
Liu has been a member of U-M’s faculty since 2000 and has held major leadership roles across the College of Engineering. She served as the College of Engineering’s associate dean for academic affairs from 2023 to 2026, a role that spans faculty recruiting and mentoring, promotion and tenure, honors and awards, faculty development and retention, and key components of academic resource planning. Her leadership work has included policy development, faculty equity review efforts, and initiatives supporting teaching faculty and mid-career coaching.
Liu served as Peter and Evelyn Fuss Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) from 2018 to 2023, overseeing faculty hiring and advancement, academic planning, and program growth. During her tenure as chair, the department launched a new ECE master of engineering program with concentrations in machine learning/data science, autonomous systems, and microelectronics and semiconductors.
In addition, she served on the Rackham Executive Board from 2018-20, co-chaired the U-M Task Force on Innovation from 2017-18, and served on the College’s COVID Council from 2020-21, which oversaw many policy decisions to support our teaching and research missions during the pandemic.
Honors and awards
At the University of Michigan, Dean Liu has been recognized with the Elizabeth C. Crosby Research Award in 2003 and 2014, the 2010 EECS Department Outstanding Achievement Award, the 2015 College of Engineering Excellence in Education Award, the 2017 College of Engineering Excellence in Service Award, the 2018 Distinguished University Innovator Award, and the 2026 Rackham Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award.
She is the recipient of the 2002 NSF CAREER Award and a number of Best Paper Awards, and has served on the editorial boards of IEEE and ACM Transactions. She is a Fellow of the IEEE and a member of the ACM. She was named an IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc) Distinguished Lecturer for the year 2026-27.
Liu earned her M.S. in systems engineering and PhD in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1997 and 2000, respectively. She completed her B.S. in electrical and computer engineering in 1995 at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in China.
Background
Mingyan Liu, Robert J. Vlasic Dean of Engineering, T. C. Chang Professor of Engineering, and professor of electrical engineering and computer science
Robert J. Vlasic
Robert Vlasic was a distinguished civic leader who earned his bachelor’s degree in industrial and mechanical engineering from U-M in 1949, where he was a member of Tau Beta Pi. After college, he worked in the Detroit food distribution business founded by his father. He assumed leadership of Vlasic Foods Co. in 1963 when it was still a small, local Michigan pickle producer. By 1978, the business had grown to $100 million and ranked number one in the nation, when it was sold to Campbell Soup Co. Bob served as a director of Campbell Soup Co. and retired as chair in 1996. He founded O/E Automation, Inc., based in Troy, Mich.
His 1996 gift to U-M established the endowed position known as the Robert J. Vlasic Dean of Engineering. It was the first endowed deanship in any U-M school or college.