Leyuan Liu

Biography

Leyuan Liu received a Bachelor of Science at Jiangxi Agricultural University, Jiangxi, Master of Science at the Graduate School of Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing, China and Ph.D. in Genetics in 1997 at Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas. He was a Postdoctoral Research Associate (1998-1999) in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, Texas A&M University, College Station, Postdoctoral Research Associate (1999-2002), Assistant Research Scientist (2002-2004) and Associate Research Scientist (2004-2006) in the Institute of Biosciences and Technology, Texas A&M Health Science Center, Houston, Texas. He was promoted to Assistant Professor (Research Track) in 2006 and Assistant Professor (Tenure Track) in 2012. He holds a joint appointment in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Medicine, College of Medicine, Texas A&M Health Science Center. He also serves as a Guest Professor of Nanchang University, Nanchang, Jiangxi Province, China.

Research Interest

The ultimate goal of Dr. Liu’s lab is to understand the general mechanism of tumorigenesis and develop strategies to prevent cancers at their origin.  It is believed that lot of ageing-related diseases such as cancers and seemingly contradictory events like cell death in degenerative diseases and uncontrolled cell growth in cancers actually share similar etiology: autophagy defect.  Autophagy is one of the most important cellular processes for selective degradation of misfolded/aggregated proteins and dysfunctional organelles. Autophagy defect leads to genome instability that is the origin of most of cancers.  However, genome instability has to be amplified through continuous cell division in order to develop into cancers.