She was a professor emerita at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and the only female president of the Operations Research Society of America (now INFORMS).
Liebman was interested in science as a child, and was inspired by a biography of Marie Curie.
She stayed at Johns Hopkins as an assistant professor of public health administration, and operations research, but in 1972 she moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign with a major appointment in the Department of Civil Engineering and a minor appointment in Mechanical and Industrial Engineering.
[2] Because both Liebman and her husband were joining the University of Illinois faculty at the same time and in the same department, her appointment required special approval from the president of the university to override the rules then in place against hiring the wife of a male faculty member.
She served as Vice-Chancellor for Research and Dean of the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1987 to 1992.