Huaitian Liu, Ph.D., M.S.
- Center for Cancer Research
- National Cancer Institute
- Building 37, Room 3050
- Bethesda, MD 20892
- 240-276-5571
- huaitian.liu@nih.gov
RESEARCH SUMMARY
Dr. Liu develops biostatistical and bioinformatic approaches for the analysis of large-scale biomedical, epidemiological data as well as ‘omics data (WGS, WES, single-cell RNA-seq, single-cell ATAC-seq, spatial transcriptomics, RNA-seq, miRNA-seq and ChIP-seq).
Areas of Expertise
Huaitian Liu, Ph.D., M.S.
Biography
Huaitian Liu, Ph.D., M.S.
Dr. Liu received his B.S. in public health from Nanjing Medical University in 1989 and his M.S. and Ph.D. in epidemiology and immunology from the Academy of Military Medical Sciences in Beijing, China in 1992 and 1997. He then moved to United States and trained as a postdoctoral fellow at the La Jolla Institute of Immunology (1998), the National Cancer Institute (1999-2001), and Johns Hopkins University (2001-2003). He completed statistics training at the Biometric Research Branch, Division of Cancer Treatment and Diagnosis, NCI, where he conducted research in Dr. Carl Barrett’s lab focusing on statistical analysis in cancer genomics. He received his M.S. in computer science from Johns Hopkins University in 2004. In 2005, he joined SAIC as a senior bioinformatics scientist. In 2011, he became the director of field application at BGI America in Boston. Dr. Liu worked at the NCI Center for Biomedical Informatics & Information Technology and in CCR's Laboratory of Cancer Biology and Genetics as a bioinformatics scientist before he was appointed Staff Scientist at the Laboratory of Human Carcinogenesis in 2022.
Research
Dr. Liu’s passion for bioinformatics developed when he was the research fellow at Johns Hopkins University (2001-2003). His professional training in biostatistics and bioinformatics at the NCI's Biometric Research Branch helped him transition from bench scientist to bioinformatics scientist. Prior to joining the Laboratory of Human Carcinogenesis, Dr. Liu worked at NCI's Center for Biomedical Informatics & Information Technology and in CCR's Laboratory of Cancer Biology and Genetics on data analyses of The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) projects, Therapeutically Applicable Research to Generate Effective Treatments (TARGET) projects, software development and many ‘omics projects. He optimizes software and pipeline development to permit reproducibility and application to similar studies for next-generation sequencing (NGS) data.
Dr. Liu’s most recent projects include: 1) investigation of the immune microenvironment landscape in tumor breast tissues from women of African and European ancestry using a single-cell multi-omics approach, 2) a precision medicine study of how inflammation may underlie the excessive burden of prostate cancer patients, and 3) evaluating the serological profiling of the viral infection history in the individuals from Tobago in a prostate case-control cohort using a synthetic human virome, VirScan.
Dr. Liu’s goal is to increase our understanding of genetic mechanisms and risk factors underlying breast cancer, prostate cancer, pancreatic cancer, melanoma, lung cancer, esophageal squamous cell carcinoma and gastric cancer, assist in developing DNA/RNA-based technology for diagnosing and treating disease, and aid physicians and other healthcare providers in applying genetics to the practice of medicine.
His collaborators include Drs. Shioko Kimura, Patricia S. Steeg and Clayton Yates (John Hopkins University).