Liu was born in Hunan Province, Southern China, in 1963.

Liu joined the faculty of Michigan State University in 1995.

He has been the Rachel Carson Chair in Sustainability since 2004 and University Distinguished Professor since 2005.

In 2004, he became the founding director of the Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability.

His publications cover a variety of topics, such as telecoupling, systems integration, sustainability, protected areas, biodiversity, ecosystem restoration, ecosystem services, forest dynamics, drivers of environmental change (e.g. divorce and household proliferation), coupled human and natural systems, ecology, ecological economics, conservation, environment, food systems, land use and land cover change, landscapes, metacoupling, climate change impact, nature-based climate solutions (e.g., natural carbon capture and sequestration), natural resources (e.g., bioenergy, forests, land, water), sociology (e.g., social norms), sustainable development goals, systems modeling, technology (e.g., AI, geographic information systems, machine learning, remote sensing), and wildlife.