Professor Liu is presently Tan Lark Sye Chair Professor in Public Policy and Global Affairs at the School of Social Sciences. He joined NTU in 2010. From 2011 to 2017 Professor Liu served as Chair of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS), which expanded rapidly to become the largest school at NTU in terms of number of faculty and students. It was reorganized as the School of Humanities and the School of Social Sciences (SSS) in 2017, and Professor Liu served as Chair of SSS till 2020. He also served concurrently as Director of the Nanyang Centre for Public Administration (NCPA) from January 2014 to December 2022, when the number of full-time postgraduate students increased by more than 10 times, from 49 to 520. At present, Professor Liu serves concurrently as Associate Vice President (International) and Senior Advisor (China Affairs Office) at the President's Office, NCPA Director (Research and Executive Education) and Executive Director of the Lien Ying Chow Legacy Fellowship.

Professor Liu’s research areas include China and the international political economy, Asian governance, international migration, Sino-Southeast Asian interactions, and global talent management. He has authored/edited 25 books and over 100 academic articles, including in leading international journals such as World Politics, Journal of Asian Studies, Critical Asian Studies, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, The China Quarterly, Journal of Contemporary China, Nature and Culture, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Global Policy, and Ethnic and Racial Studies . His publications also appear in the French, Dutch, Japanese, Chinese, Indonesian and Korean languages. Professor Liu has been included in the prestigious Stanford University/Elsevier "World's Top 2% Scientists List" for 2024 and the previous four years as well as the "Career-long Citation Impact" list.

Professor Liu has held a number of visiting professorship/fellowship appointments, including at Harvard, Kyoto, Osaka, Peking, Amsterdam, and Stockholm Universities. His professional service includes serving as Vice President of the Asian Association of World Historians and as a research committee member of the International Institute of Administrative Sciences (IIAS). He is presently Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Chinese Overseas (Boston and Leiden) and International Journal of Diasporic Chinese Studies (Singapore), and Routledge Monograph Series Public Governance in Asia, and is on the editorial board of Journal of Contemporary China (Routledge), Asian Review of World History(Brill), Routledge Monograph Series The Chinese World (London and New York), and Brill Chinese Overseas Monograph Series (Boston and Leiden), among others.

Professor Liu was awarded the Singapore National Day Public Administration Medal (Silver) in August 2021 and received the Singapore Ministry of Education Service to Education Award in 2019.