Xiaole Shirley Liu

Early life Xiaole Shirley Liu was born 刘小乐 in Tianjin China to Meilun Liu and Xingke Hu, both on the faculty of Tianjin University. From an early age, her elder brother sparked her interest in biology.

Education Xiaole Liu attended Peking University in 1992–1994. She transferred to Smith College and graduated summa cum laude in 1997 double majoring in biochemistry and computer science. Her research thesis, supervised under Steve Williams, was awarded the Highest Departmental Honors in Biochemistry.

She then went to Stanford University and got her Ph.D. in biomedical Informatics and computer science in 2002. Her thesis committee included Douglas Brutlag, Jun S. Liu, Russ Altman, Patrick O. Brown 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. Liu 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 of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) in 2019 for her “outstanding contributions to the fields of computational biology and bioinformatics”.