Biography
Dr. Liu comes to UC Irvine after having spent the last 11 years of his illustrious academic career at Brown University where he held dual appointments in the School of Public Health and the Alpert School of Medicine. In addition, he served as Director of Brown’s Center for Global Cardiometabolic Health. Prior to his tenure at Brown, Dr. Liu was a faculty member at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine from 2005 to 2013 where he also held various leadership roles across the larger UCLA campus. Prior to UCLA, he was an associate professor at the Harvard Medical School and School of Public Health. He also completed a fellowship in the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) Program at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Current Projects/Studies
His research is focused on identifying risk factors for and distributions of complex diseases with special emphasis on understanding how our environment, genomes, and their interactions affect outcomes in diverse populations around the world (i.e., defined by sex, ethnicities, geopolitical regions, lifespan, and evolutionary forces). Employing state-of-the art multi-platforms and methodologies that typically cut across multiple domains and disciplines (e.g., nutrition, genetics, molecular biology, pathophysiology, statistics, and epidemiology), we conduct both observational and experimental studies to aid in causal inference.
Education
- MD in Clinical Medicine, Jinan University School of Medicine
- MS in Epidemiology, State University of New York at Albany
- MPH in Quantitative Methods, Harvard University
- ScD in Epidemiology and Nutrition (double major with a minor in Biostatistics), Harvard University
- MA in Master of Arts Ad eundem (honorary), Brown University
Honors and Awards
- 1998 Swedish Fellowship, Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden
- 2000 Physician Scientist Development Award (K08), National Institute of Health
- 2004 Fellow of the American Heart Association (FAHA)
- 2009 Excellence in Mentoring, UCLA
- 2012 Elected Member, American Society of Clinical Investigation (ASCI, The ASCI is an honorific society of physician-scientists who primarily conduct basic laboratory and/or translational work to advance clinical medicine), and American Epidemiological Society (AES, The AES is an honorific society of epidemiologists and public health scientists known as “diseases detective”)
- 2013 Adjunct Professor of Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA
- 2015 Adjunct Professor (Honorary), National Center for Cardiovascular Diseases, Fuwai Hospital and Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences
- 2015 Adjunct Professor of Medicine and Chief Consultant (Endocrinology), Guangdong General/Provincial Hospital, Guangdong Academy of Medical Sciences, Adjunct Clinical Professor (Honorary), Hong Kong Institute of Diabetes and Obesity, Prince of Wales, Shatin, HongKong, China
- 2015 Listed by Google as one of the most highly cited scholars with an H-index >100
- 2016 American Heart Association (AHA) Mentoring Award
- 2017, 2019 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Mentoring, Brown University
- 2017 Research Innovation Award, American Society of Nutrition (ASN)
- 2019 Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Global Health on behalf of the United States
- 2020 Anandi L. Sharma Visiting Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine at Mount Sinai Heart, the Icahn School of Medicine of Mount Sinai
- 2022 Scott Grundy Award for Excellent in Metabolism Research, AHA
- 2022 Visiting Professorship Awarded by CAPES/PRINT, Universidade Federal de Sao Paulo (UNIFESP), Ministry of Education, Brazil
