Sonya Liu

Graduating in the summer of 2025, Sonya Liu is a McGill ArtSci student studying both Physics and English Literature. During her gap year before McGill, she worked under Dr. Hadzhiyska, (then PhD candidate; now Postdoc Fellow), contributing to the paper, ‘Galaxy assembly bias and large-scale distribution: a comparison between IllustrisTNG (TNG) and a semi-analytic model (SAM)’. At McGill, she was awarded the SURA (Science Undergraduate Research Award) in 2023 to complete a summer research project under Professor Hong Guo, which saw her calculating gate efficiency and gate capacitances in semiconductor quantum dots.

Over the summer of 2024, she’d intern under Professor Jason Rowe at Bishop’s through the Trottier Excellence Grant for Summer Interns, cataloging exoplanets and sorting through databases. Physics background aside, Sonya involves herself in student government (despite her dislike for bureaucracy) and is an avid drinker of tea.