Dr. Yulin Liu holds a compound academic background in physics and economics: dual Bachelor's degrees in Physics from Wuhan University and Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, followed by an M.Sc. in Physics and a Ph.D. in Economics from ETH Zurich, where he also completed his postdoctoral research. His early research focused on forward guidance in monetary policy and macroprudential policy, with results published in economics journals including the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control and Macroeconomic Dynamics. He has also held visiting and adjunct academic appointments, and taught and supervised students, at universities including Duke Kunshan University, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, NYU Shanghai, and Duke University.
In recent years, his research agenda has expanded from blockchain economics into the empirical study of the financial behaviour of AI agents, with results appearing in venues including Scientific Data and ACM CCS — reflecting both a solid scholarly foundation and the independent scientific leadership to continually open new directions.
Crucially, Dr. Liu has long worked at the industry frontier — serving as Senior Economist at the DFINITY Foundation, Senior Economic Advisor at Chainlink, Visiting Economist at the Bank of Finland, and industry doctoral supervisor at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). This experience endows the Lab's research with a full-chain capacity spanning theory, empirics, and implementation that distinguishes it from purely academic work. Many of his core results have been tested in a stricter form than peer review: economic mechanisms of his design have operated at scale in live systems for years, bearing over ten billion USD in real assets without incident — reliability verified by markets, not only by referees. Such results, often undisclosed owing to commercial confidentiality, form an irreplaceable part of his research standing.
Dr. Liu currently leads the Swiss Quantum Economics AI Lab on a full-time basis, pursuing frontier research at the intersection of economics, artificial intelligence, and financial systems. He concurrently serves as a board member of the Swiss DEF Foundation and as topic editor of several academic journals, contributing actively to the organisation and development of the international scholarly community.