Newswise — LOS ANGELES (April 11, 2013) – Prominent medical
statistics expert Zhenqiu Liu, PhD, has joined Cedars-Sinai as the
director of Bioinformatics in the Department of Medicine’s
Hematology/Oncology Division. Bioinformatics helps tailor discoveries
and treatment plans for patients by uncovering the way individual genes
and gene sequences respond to specific therapies. The goal of
bioinformatics is to prescribe treatments that are likely to be
optimally effective, based on a patient’s genetic makeup.
“Bioinformatics
is a rapidly growing and exciting field in medicine,” said Steven
Piantadosi, MD, PhD, director of the Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer
Institute at Cedars-Sinai. “Cedars-Sinai has a long tradition of
leadership in emerging technologies and innovations in patient care. We
are excited to welcome Dr. Liu, one of the most notable scientists in
this emerging field.”
Prior to joining Cedars-Sinai, Liu was an
associate professor of bioinformatics at the Department of Epidemiology
and Public Health at Greenebaum Cancer Center at the University of
Maryland School of Medicine. Liu’s research there was in the broad area
of bioinformatics, computational biology and big data mining and funded
by the National Cancer Institute and the National Science Foundation.
The
Department of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics at Cedars-Sinai offers
comprehensive statistical consulting and data services for clinical and
basic science cancer research initiatives. Currently, Liu is
concentrating on research topics such as survivorship predictions,
biomarker identification and computational techniques.
“Most
individuals who use a cellphone don’t understand how it works, but they
rely on its output and expect the phone to work properly,” said Robert
Figlin, MD, FACP, professor of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences,
director of the Division of Hematology Oncology and deputy director at
Cedars-Sinai’s Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute. The field
of bioinformatics is similar—patients expect therapies and drugs to work
for their specific disease, without a need to or desire to understand
the mechanics of how the treatment actually works. Liu and colleagues
will be responsible for dissecting the ‘how’ of research and translating
it to patient care.”
Liu earned a PhD in Operations Research
with a concentration in data mining, as well as a master’s degree in
Computer Science, both from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.
His postdoctoral training was at the Bioinformatics Cell, Telemedicine
and Advanced Technology Research Center in Fort Detrick, Md., and at the
Department of Statistics at Ohio State University.
Joining Liu
on the quest to develop new personalized medical regimens is Xiao Zhang,
PhD, a research scientist in the field of biostatistics. Zhang will
utilize her research expertise in multivariate analysis using the
Bayesian method, a technique used to update the probability estimates,
missing data analysis, survival analysis and statistical methods in
clinical trials. She earned her master’s degree in probability and
statistics from Beijing University of China and her doctorate in
biostatistics from the University of California, Los Angeles. Zhang
comes to Cedars-Sinai from the University of Alabama, Birmingham, where
she was a research assistant professor in the Department of
Biostatistics at the University of Alabama, Birmingham.
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