IYPT 2025
Team Singapore Captain
World Champions at the International Young Physicists' Tournament 2025
Hi, I'm Austin 👋
Austin Liu Zi Rui
刘子睿
Raffles Institution Singapore
I’m currently focused on physics and applied machine learning. I was honoured to captain Team Singapore at the 2025 International Young Physicists' Tournament in Sweden, where we won the championship. I also conduct research on interpretable drug–target interaction prediction using deep learning. Outside the lab, I chair the Raffles Physics Club, driving community and physics outreach initiatives, and I take part in business competitions. My hobbies include juggling, playing badminton, doing crossword puzzles, and playing the Erhu.
Affiliations
You may know me from
Communities & teams I lead
Raffles Physics Club
Chairperson
Making physics fun and accessible to all
Raffles Entrepreneurs' Network
Member
Student-led ventures and business competitions
RI Infocomm Club
Competitive Programming Trainer
Organising camps and training sessions for aspiring competitive programmers
Research
Selected work
My applied science projects spanning multiple disciplines
Bioinformatics / Drug Discovery 2026
3DICE: Interpretable 3D Cross-Modal Learning for Drug–Target Interaction Prediction
We propose 3DICE, a DTI prediction framework that fuses 3D structure-aware drug/protein embeddings (UniMol, ESM-IF1) via cross-attention to improve generalisability and cold-start performance while enabling intrinsic interpretability. 3DICE achieves state-of-the-art results and supports more rigorous interpretability analysis.
Drug–target interaction prediction Structure-based representation Multimodal fusion Interpretable AI
Physics / Soft Robotics IYPT 2025
Comprehensive Analytical Modelling of Hysteretic Nonlinear Dynamics of a Pneumatic Air Muscle
Derived a superior nonlinear viscoelastic model for the McKibben Artificial Muscle that relieves over-reliance on black-box computational methods, modelling hysteresis.
8.00 points at IYPT, highest-scoring report.
Watch the presentation Lagrangian mechanics Mooney-Rivlin Model Hysteresis
Physics / Fluid Dynamics IYPT 2025
Levitation of Liquid Layers via Dynamic Suppression of the Rayleigh–Taylor Instability and Associated Faraday Instability
Mapped the stability boundaries for vertically oscillated fluid layers levitating above air layers.
7.88 points at IYPT, second highest-scoring report.
Interfacial fluid instabilities Dynamic stabilisation
Biology / Waste processing 2023
Factors Affecting Hermetia illucens in Digesting Food Waste and Quality of Frass Produced
This study tested how temperature and food waste composition affect Black Soldier Fly Larvae (BSFL) digestion and the quantity/quality of frass produced, across three controlled experimental stages.
Sustainability Black Soldier Fly Larvae
Projects
Some things I'm working on
Stay Tuned!
Big projects
Coming soon
Full write-ups and interactive case studies are in progress. I’ll publish the builds once pilots finish testing.
Other
Small things
VRN Checksum
Singapore Car Plate Generator and Checksum.
Pathway Demo
A mockup website made for my REN Trials.