Yang Liu
Quick Facts
Biography
Yang Liu is a Chinese-American immunologist. He serves as Director of the Division of Immunotherapy, Institute of Human Virology, University of Maryland Baltimore.
Biography
Liu was an associate research scientist at Yale School of Medicine , and then an Assistant, and subsequentlyAssociate Professor at the New York University Medical Center from 1992-1998. From 1998-2006, he was the Kurtz Chair Professor and the Director of Division of Cancer Immunology, Department of Pathology, at the Ohio State University. From 2006-2012, he was the De Nancrede Professor and The Director of Division of Immunotherapy in the Department of Surgery at the University of Michigan. From 2012-2017, he was the Bosworth Professor and the Director for the Center for Cancer and Immunology Research at The Children’s National Medical Center. He is currently Professor and the Director at the Division of Immunotherapy, the Institute of Human Virology and the Department of Surgery at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
Liu is also the Founder of OncoImmune, Inc. and serves as its chairman.
Research
Liu's work focuses on immune recognition of cancer and activation of lymphocytes. In his postdoctoral work in Janeway's laboratory at Yale University, he provided the first evidence that components from a diverse range of microbes, which had been called pathogen-associated molecular patterns by Janeway, act by inducing co-stimulatory activity in antigen-presenting cells, andsuggestedthis asthe explanation for how the immune system can distinguish between “infectious non-self and non-infectious self”.
Honors
Liu has received Irvington Fellow (1990), the Markey Scholar Award (1992), and the Searle Scholar Award (1993), IEEE Leon K. Kirchmayer Graduate Teaching Award (2001), and Snyder Award for Cancer Research (2015) and was elected tofellow at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 2004 .