Ping Liu

Ping Liu (born 1964) is a Chinese New Zealand academic, and is a full professor at the University of Otago, specialising in neurobiology, especially how arginine metabolism affects brain function in normal ageing and in diseases such as schizophrenia and Alzheimer's disease.

Academic career
Liu is a neurobiologist with a medical background. She completed an MB at Anhui University and then worked for eight years as a geriatrician in China before joining her husband in New Zealand, where he had studied. Liu realised that working as a doctor in New Zealand would be difficult due to the language barrier, so made the decision to retrain as a researcher. She joined the staff of the University of Otago in 1994, and began a PhD in the Department of Psychology, supervised by David Bilkey, the following year. She completed her doctoral thesis, titled Perirhinal cortex contributions to spatial memory in 1998, and rose to full professor in 2020. She is part of the Otago's Brain Health Research Centre.

Liu's research focuses on neurodegenerative disorders such as schizophrenia and Alzheimer's disease, and on the changes in memory, learning and brain metabolism during normal ageing. Liu investigates the metabolic products of the semi-essential amino acid arginine. Liu's research has shown that altered arginine metabolism is associated with both schizophrenia and Alzheimer's disease. One metabolic product of arginine, agmatine, is a possible new neurotransmitter, but its role in learning and memory is as yet poorly understood. Liu's research group uses animal models and post-mortem human brain tissue to investigate how these changed processes lead to disease, and to try to identify possible diagnostic tests and therapeutic targets. In particular, Liu believes that arginine metabolites might present a less-invasive and costly test for Alzheimer's disease than the present diagnostic tests of brain scans and cerebrospinal fluid testing. It might also be possible to diagnose people earlier through such biomarkers. Liu is also investigating whether arginine metabolism differences might be involved in the clinical differences seen between early and late-onset Alzheimer's disease.

Liu's group is also researching the effects of prenatal viral exposure in children.