Scholar Stories: Liu’s Biomedical Engineering Path Reaches Beyond Family Volleyball Legacy
10/5/2022 10:00:00 AM | Volleyball, Features
Continuing the series that began in 2016-17, each Wednesday MGoBlue.com will highlight a Michigan student-athlete and their academic pursuits. These are our Scholar-Athlete Stories, presented by Absopure.
By Kiera Burns
There's sure to be a reaction anytime someone introduces themselves as a biomedical engineering major, and senior setter Jenni Liu is pursuing the challenging major in stride along with extracurricular research and a master's degree in bioinformatics.
Liu's parents both played professional volleyball, but in no way did they force her into the sport. She chose to give the sport a try around age 11, playing for a club team in her small hometown in Germany. Speaking about her parents' initial hesitancy about her playing the sport, Liu emphasized that playing was her own decision.
"They also wanted to open up other career paths that are not sport-related because they went the sports path," she said, "which was great, but they wanted me to have a happy and secure life and let me choose."
Her mom was her first coach and taught her technique at the beginning of her volleyball career
"Volleyball was bringing our family together, something we would talk (about) at the dinner table and we would talk after practice," said Liu.
When she moved up to other teams that her mom was not coaching, Liu described how her mom was still involved by spending lots of time teaching her technique outside of her team's official practice and pushing her in a positive way.
"She took the time and gave me extra reps," said Liu. "I think thanks to all of her instruction and tips I was able to advance and be part of the recruiting process for the German youth national team."
Liu went to boarding school to play with the German youth national team in Berlin and credits this experience with making the college transition easier since she had been living away from home since she was 15.
She described how this prepared her for the similarly rigorous schedule of a student-athlete.
"The national team and Olympic sports center is in Berlin, so they recruit young girls to come to boarding school and practice, live, eat and sleep together a little bit like here to prepare for the national team."
Liu added that the national team had more perspective and that she credits having the chance to attend with her mom helping her develop as a player along the way.
A major difference between her career and that of her parents is that her parents pursued their sport and solely dedicated themselves to their volleyball careers without the simultaneous academic path. The importance of being able to be a student-athlete and pursuing an academic and athletic career without having to sacrifice one for the other led Liu to explore college volleyball in the United States. Michigan appealed to Liu for its excellence in both areas and she wants to thank Michigan for welcoming her and giving her the opportunity to play for the past four years.
Liu was not sure exactly what she wanted to pursue academically coming into her freshman year, but she knew she was interested in medicine and biological and health science before settling on biomedical engineering her sophomore year.
"Another reason why I chose biomedical engineering was because it was a challenge; I like to challenge myself and test my limits," Liu said.
Outside of her engineering classes, Liu is also involved in a research lab called Chandrasekaran Lab for the past year doing computational work, and she hopes to go into computational biology.
Considering her research one of the most fun and relevant activities she is involved in academically, Liu described her research project in detail.
"We are doing research on antibiotic combination therapy," she said. "Basically, we are exploring if a drug would work better or worse if taken with another drug based on its molecular characteristics. We feed this information into our computer and use machine learning algorithms to predict the outcome of drug combinations we haven't tried before. The goal is to find new effective antibiotic therapies because bacteria are becoming more and more drug-resistant."
Liu believes the lab will publish this paper in the next few months to add to her list of accomplishments as a student-athlete at Michigan.
Adding that she would have her final paper for an anthropology class published based on imagination and scientific paradigms, Liu clearly pushes herself across the board in multiple disciplines. She credits being a college athlete with providing her with multiple soft skills she will use in her future career, including time management, confidence, people skills and social interactions. She is still learning to balance volleyball with her rigorous academic courses even though it was a path she chose to pursue but emphasized that finding the balance is possible if you truly want both the academic and athletic success enough.
Liu has truly taken her time at Michigan and put it to good use with her academic pursuits and her time on the volleyball court. Giving advice to any other international student-athletes, she suggests, "Anyone who comes here should come without any expectations, good or bad, and just enjoy the time here, use opportunities and be open to new experiences."
