Abstract:
Big cancer genomics data have been accumulated at a fascinating speed. But it remains a great challenge to translate these big data into biomedical insights, thereby making translational impacts. To address this challenge, I will discuss (i) how to develop AI-driven data analytics to enable a broad community to analyze these data in a more fluent way; (ii) how to characterize the molecular basis of human cancers in a more comprehensive way; and (iii) how to develop functional genomics approaches to identify key events for clinical applications. 

Bio:
Dr. Liang is a Barnhart Family Distinguished Professor in Targeted Therapies and the Deputy Chair of Department of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. He is also a professor in the Department of Systems Biology. He received his B.S. in chemistry from Peking University (China) in 2001 and Ph.D. in quantitative and computational biology from Princeton University (NJ, USA) in 2006. Dr. Liang then finished his postdoctoral training in evolutionary and computational genomics at the University of Chicago. He joined MD Anderson Cancer Center as Assistant Professor and started his own group in 2009.

At MD Anderson, Dr. Liang's group focuses on bioinformatics tool development, integrated cancer genomic analysis, regulatory RNA regulation/modification, and cancer systems biology. His systematic studies on enhancer regulation, RNA editing, functional proteomics, sex effects, and driver mutations in cancer have generated profound impacts on the biomedical research community and attracted wide attention such as The Wall Street Journal and Newsweek. The bioinformatics tools his group developed (such as TCPA, TANRIC, FASMIC, DrBioRight) collectively have >110,000 active users worldwide. Since 2010, he has published >140 papers  total citation >25,000 times), including 41 corresponding-author papers in top journals such as Cell, Cancer Cell, Nature Genetics, Nature Biotechnology, and Nature Methods.

Dr. Liang have taken leadership roles in large cancer consortium projects, including chair of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) PanCanAtlas working groups, one co-leader of International Cancer Genome Consortium (ICGC) Pan-Cancer Whole Genome Analysis Project, and one co-chair of NCI Genomic Data Commons (GDC) QC working group. He won several awards including MD Anderson R. Lee Clark Fellow Award (2014), the University of Texas System STARS Award (2015), MD Anderson Faculty Scholar Award (2018), and AACR Team Science Award (2020). He is an elected Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).