Xiaole Shirley Liu

Xiaole Shirley Liu (刘小乐) is 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 is now the co-founder and CEO of GV20 Therapeutics.

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.

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 Ph.D. minor in 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 research work focused on algorithm development and data integration modeling for translational cancer research. Her group developed widely used algorithms for modeling transcriptional and epigenetic gene regulation (MACS, Cistrome, MDscan, BETA), analyzing CRISPR screens (MAGeCK), and characterizing tumor immunity (TIMER, TIDE, TRUST). She also contributed to the discovery of cancer drug response biomarkers, drug resistance mechanisms, and effective combination therapies.

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”.