As the state partners with The Jackson Laboratory to build a personalized medicine facility on the campus of the UConn Health Center, the Health Center has made another deal with the Maine-based genetics research firm:

Dr. Edison Liu, Jackson Lab’s president and chief executive officer, will speak at the Health Center commencement exercises, May 13 at the Connecticut Convention Center in Hartford.

Liu, who has been president of the international group the Human Genome Organisation since 2007, joined the Laboratory from the Genome Institute of Singapore. As founding executive director, he built the GIS from a staff of three into a major research institute of 27 laboratory groups and a staff of 270, with faculty in functional genomics, computational biology, population genetics and genome-to-systems biology.

Before moving to Singapore in 2001, he was the scientific director of the National Cancer Institute’s Division of Clinical Sciences in Bethesda, Md.

Liu obtained his B.S. in chemistry and psychology, as well as his M.D., at Stanford University. He served his internship and residency at Washington University’s Barnes Hospital in St. Louis, followed by an oncology fellowship at Stanford. From 1982 to 1987 he was at the University of California, San Francisco, first in a hematology fellowship at Moffitt Hospital and then as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Nobel laureate J. Michael Bishop, while also serving as an instructor in the School of Medicine.

From 1987 to 1996 he was at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he rose to director of the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center’s Specialized Program of Research Excellence in Breast Cancer, the director of the Laboratory of Molecular Epidemiology at UNC’s School of Public Health, chief of medical genetics, and chair of the Correlative Science Committee of the national cooperative clinical trials group, CALGB. Liu also held faculty positions in the UNC departments of medicine, epidemiology, biochemistry and biophysics, and genetics.

Liu’s own scientific research has focused on the functional genomics of human cancers, particularly breast cancer, uncovering new oncogenes, and deciphering the dynamics of gene regulation on a genomic scale that modulate cancer biology. He has authored nearly 300 scientific papers and reviews, and co-authored two books.

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