Adeline (Pinyu) Liao

Adeline (Pinyu) Liao is an undergraduate researcher at Stanford University studying Computer Science (Computational Biology) with a minor in Economics. Her work sits at the intersection of global health, political economy, and institutional infrastructure that shape access to medicines in emerging markets.

Liao is the founder and CEO of Niora Systems, a pharmaceutical procurement and financial infrastructure company working to address drug stockouts in low- and middle-income countries. Through partnerships with leading Ghanaian hospitals, including Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital and Trust Hospital, she is building systems that stabilize procurement markets by improving contract enforcement, payment reliability, and supply chain coordination.

At Stanford, Liao conducts interdisciplinary research spanning political economy, health systems, and computational biology. She is a student researcher under the mentorship of Dr. Karen Eggleston at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Nobel Laureate Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi. Previously, Liao conducted research in proteomics and chemical biology under Dr. Carolyn Bertozzi (Stanford), Dr. Martin Welch (University of Cambridge), and Dr. Susan Hagen (Harvard Medical School), contributing to work on LYTAC technology and cell surface proteomics. She has co-authored research published in Cell and has presented computational biology research internationally. Her early research received multiple distinctions, including Second Place Grand Award at the International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) and selection to the MIT Research Science Institute (RSI).

Beyond her scientific research, Liao has pursued science communication and public scholarship. She founded Lavender + Lab Coats, a global science writing platform that reached more than 80,000 monthly readers across over 130 countries. Her documentary, The Quest to Stop Antibiotic Resistance, was screened by the World Health Organization and recognized at multiple international film festivals. She has spoken on topics including antibiotic resistance and global health, and was the youngest speaker at TEDxStanford 2024.

Her academic and entrepreneurial work is driven by a central question: how markets and institutions can be redesigned to ensure that essential medicines reliably reach patients. Through both research and entrepreneurship, she focuses on developing infrastructure that underpins functional markets, including procurement systems, logistics networks, and financial coordination mechanisms that enable healthcare systems to operate reliably at scale.

Liao was born in Taiwan and raised across the United States and Taiwan. Outside of her work, she is interested in historical architecture and medical history and hopes one day to restore historic medical buildings around the world.