Xiaole Shirley Liu (Chinese: 刘小乐) is a computational biologist, cancer researcher, and entrepreneur.Xiaole Shirley Liu's She has been a

Professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other tertiary education, post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin ...

in the Department of Data Sciences at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and

Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health is the public health school at Harvard University, located in the Longwood Medical Area of Boston, Massachusetts. It was named after Hong Kong entrepreneur Chan Tseng-hsi in 2014 following a US$350 ...

. She co-founde
GV20 Therapeutics
and, in early 2022, left DFCI to become its full-time CEO.

Early life

Xiaole Shirley Liu was born 刘小乐 in

Tianjin Tianjin is a direct-administered municipality in North China, northern China on the shore of the Bohai Sea. It is one of the National Central City, nine national central cities, with a total population of 13,866,009 inhabitants at the time of the ...

China to Meilun Liu and Xingke Hu, both on the faculty of

Tianjin University Tianjin University (TJU; zh, t=, , s=天津大学, p=, labels=no), previously Peiyang University (), is a National university, national Public university, public research university in Tianjin, China. Established in 1895 by a royal charter from ...

. From an early age, her elder brother sparked her interest in biology.

Education

Xiaole Liu attended

Peking University Peking University (PKU) is a Public university, public Types of universities and colleges in China#By designated academic emphasis, university in Haidian, Beijing, China. It is affiliated with and funded by the Ministry of Education of the Peop ...

in 1992–1994. She transferred to

Smith College Smith College is a Private university, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts Women's colleges in the United States, women's college in Northampton, Massachusetts, United States. It was chartered in 1871 by Sophia Smit ...

and graduated s''umma cum laude'' in 1997 double majoring in biochemistry and computer science. Her research thesis, supervised unde
Steve Williams
was awarded the Highest Departmental Honors in Biochemistry. She then went to

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

and got her Ph.D. in biomedical Informatics and computer science in 2002. Her

thesis committee A thesis (: theses), or dissertation (abbreviated diss.), is a document submitted in support of candidature for an academic degree or professional qualification presenting the author's research and findings.International Standard ISO 7144: D ...

included Douglas Brutlag, Jun S. Liu,

Russ Altman Russ Biagio Altman is an American professor of bioengineering, genetics, medicine, and biomedical data science (and of computer science, by courtesy) and past chairman of the bioengineering department at Stanford University. Education Altman h ...

Patrick O. Brown Patrick O'Reilly Brown (born 1954) is an American geneticist and businessman who is the founder of Impossible Foods Inc. and professor emeritus in the department of biochemistry at Stanford University. Brown is co-founder of the Public Library o ...

and Rob Tibshirani. She added Shirley as her middle name after Ph.D., and used X. Shirley Liu in her publications.

Career

Shirley Liu was a professor of Biostatistics and Computational Biology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Shirley is also a highly cited researcher with works focused on computational development and data integration modeling for translational cancer research. Her group developed widely used approaches and frameworks that have advanced our understanding of transcriptional and epigenetic gene regulation (MACS, Cistrome, MDscan, BETA), CRISPR screens (MAGeCK), and tumor immunity (TIMER, TIDE, TRUST). She also contributed to the discovery of cancer drug response biomarkers, drug resistance mechanisms, and effective combination therapies. In 2016, Shirley co-founded GV20 Therapeutics. In 2022, she then became the CEO of GV20.

Published Works

Awards and honours

X. Shirley Liu was elected a

Fellow A fellow is a title and form of address for distinguished, learned, or skilled individuals in academia, medicine, research, and industry. The exact meaning of the term differs in each field. In learned society, learned or professional society, p ...

of the

International Society for Computational Biology The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) is a scholarly society for researchers in computational biology and bioinformatics. The society was founded in 1997 to provide a stable financial home for the Intelligent Systems for Mo ...

(ISCB) in 2019 for her “outstanding contributions to the fields of

computational biology Computational biology refers to the use of techniques in computer science, data analysis, mathematical modeling and Computer simulation, computational simulations to understand biological systems and relationships. An intersection of computer sci ...

and

bioinformatics Bioinformatics () is an interdisciplinary field of science that develops methods and Bioinformatics software, software tools for understanding biological data, especially when the data sets are large and complex. Bioinformatics uses biology, ...

”.

References

American bioinformaticians Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Stanford University alumni {{biologist-stub