Dr. Liu is an associate professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy at McGovern Medical School and the faculty member in the Center for Precision Health at McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics at UTHealth Houston. Within the domain of bioinformatics, her lab develops computational and statistical methods to analyze and integrate heterogeneous data sources for understanding how biological interactions modulate complex signaling responses. In the past few years, she has also built on her knowledge of gene networks to investigate gene signatures and pathways that are involved in common cancers and neurological diseases from large-scale genomic data analysis. She has served as the program committee members for a number of scientific conferences. She has participated in grant reviews for a variety of funding agencies, including NIH, NSF, AAAS and Microsoft.
Research
Statistical models to reconstruct biological networks, signal transduction pathway reconstruction, Bayesian inference and bioinformatics
Publications
- Savarraj J, Parsha KN, Hergenroeder G, Zhu L, Bajgur S, Ahn S, Lee K, Chang T, Kim D, Liu Y, and Choi H. Systematic Model of Peripheral Inflammation after Subarachnoid Hemorrhage. Neurology, in press.
- Moussa H, Baha S, Blackwell S, Leon M, Redell, J, Liu Y, Dash P, and Longo M. Contribution of Maternal Hypertension to Autism Etiology in a Murine Model; Cerebellar Gene Expression. Future Neurology, in press.
- Wang Z. and Liu Y. Predicting functional microRNA-mRNA interactions. In: MicroRNA Detection and Target Identification (Dalmay, T., ed), Springer, 2017.
- Woodfield S, Guo R, Liu Y, Major A, Hollingsworth E, Indiviglio S, Whittle S, Mo Q, Bean A, Ittmann M, Lopez-Terrada D, and Zage P. Neuroblastoma patient outcomes, tumor differentiation, and ERK activation are correlated with expression levels of the ubiquitin ligase UBE4B. Genes and Cancer, 7: 13-26, 2016.
- Woodfield S, Zhang L, Scorsone K, Liu Y, and Zage P. Binimetinib inhibits MEK and is effective against neuroblastoma tumor cells with low NF1 expression. BMC Cancer, 16: 172, 2016.
- Wang Z. Xu W, and Liu Y. Systematic and integrative analysis of gene expression to identify feature genes underlying human diseases. In: Translational Bioinformatics in Transcriptomic and Gene Regulation (Wu, J., ed), pp: 161-185, Springer, 2016.