Xiaole Shirley Liu (Chinese: Ã¥ÂÂå°Âä¹Â) is a computational biologist, cancer researcher, and entrepreneur. She has been a Professor in the Department of Data Sciences at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She co-founded GV20 Therapeutics and, in early 2022, left DFCI to become its full-time CEO.
Xiaole Shirley Liu was born Ã¥ÂÂå°Âä¹ 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.
Xiaole Liu attended Peking University in 1992âÂÂ1994. 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.
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.
X. Shirley Liu was elected a Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) in 2019 for her âÂÂoutstanding contributions to the fields of computational biology and bioinformaticsâÂÂ.