Prof. Liang received his Ph.D degree from Boston University in 1993. He workedin the University of Maryland from 1993 to 2022, and currently is a Chair Professor and the Head of the Department of Geography, University of Hong Kong. He also serves as the Director of the Jockey Club STEM Laboratory of Quantitative Remote Sensing.

His research interests are mainly in three areas:

	1) Developing various satellite inversion methods and algorithms, with the recent focus on remote sensing AI foundation models
	2) Producing global high-level satellite products, such as the Global Land Surface Satellite (GLASS) product suite and the High-resolution GLASS (Hi-GLASS) products
	3) Applying satellite data products to assess social-economic and environmental challenges, such as food security, poverty, climate change, and sustainable development.

Prof. Liang has published over 490 SCI-indexed peer-reviewed papers in various interdisciplinary journals (e.g., Science, Science Advances, Nature Climate Change, Nature Communications) as well as disciplinary journals. He has authored or edited eight books in English, five of which have been translated into Chinese, and one book in Chinese. He served as the Editor-in-Chief of the nine-volume Comprehensive Remote Sensing with Elsevier and has published 42 book chapters. He was an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing (2001-2013) and a guest editor of several remote sensing journals. He is currently an Editor-in-Chief of Science of Remote Sensing.

As of Dec. 2024, his H-index is 105, with over 45,000 citations in Google Scholar (see his personal page). He has been identified as a Highly Cited Researcher by Clarivate, ranking among the top 0.1% of the world's scientists and social scientists.

Prof. Liang is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).