Ganqiang Liu, Ph.D.
gliu@mgh.harvard.edu
Hale Building for Transformative Medicine, 60 Fenwood Road, Boston, MA
The goal of Dr. Ganqiang Liu’s research is to investigate how the genome functions in the human brain and build a future precision medicine for neurodegenerative disease. His current research focuses on genetic variants and prognosis of Parkinson’s disease.
Dr. Liu found that mutations in the Beta-glucocerebrosidase gene (GBA) are causal for neuropathic Gaucher’s disease (GD) in homozygotes, and are associated with aggressive cognitive decline in heterozygous PD patients. He also developed a clinical-genetic cognitive risk score (termed CRS) to predict global cognitive impairment in patients with Parkinson’s disease. He is now leading a project focused on genetic architecture controlling PD phenotypes: discovery of novel genetic variants to predict prognosis in Parkinson’s disease at genome-wide scale using large longitudinal cohorts.
Dr. Liu received a PhD degree in Bioinformatics from the University of Queensland, Australia, training with Professor John Mattick (who pioneered the concept of non-coding or “dark matter” RNAs) at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience and at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research, and was a Research Fellow in Dr. Scherzer’s Neurogenomics Laboratory. Dr. Liu is an Instructor in Neurology at Harvard Medical School and a research assistant in Neurology of Ann Romney Center for Neurological Disease in Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
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