Jianjun Liu, Ph.D

Professor Jianjun Liu is currently the Deputy Executive Director at the Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS) and Professor at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore. Prof Liu did his undergraduate study at the University of Science and Technology of China, got his Master degree from the Institute of Oceanology at the Chinese Academy of Science and was awarded PhD degree on quantitative genetics at Duke University. After finishing his postdoctoral training on the genetics of psychiatric disorders at the Columbia University, Prof Liu joined GIS faculty in 2002. 

Prof Liu’s main research interest is to understand the genetic bases of human diseases.  Focusing on Asian populations, he has pursued collaborative research to discover genetic variants that influence disease susceptibility, progression and treatment outcome. Prof Liu’s research covers diverse disease phenotypes, including cancers, autoimmune/inflammatory diseases, neurological/neurosychiatric disorders, metabolic and cardiovascular diseases, and infectious diseases. Prof Liu’s research efforts have pioneered early genome-wide association studies of complex diseases and adverse drug reaction in Asian population and contributed to understanding the genetic architecture of Asian populations. Recently, Prof Liu has expanded his research to population genomics by exploring the application of large-scale genome sequencing analysis as well as the integrated analysis of genetic and epigenetic information for investigating complex diseases.  In addition, Prof Liu has also worked on generating and improving genetic and technical resources that can empower large-scale genetic studies of Asian populations, such as generating new Asian-centric reference genomes.

By publishing over 470 peer reviewed papers with over 49,000 citations (H-index = 95, Web of Science 2022), Prof Liu’s research has been well recognized by international research community. Prof Liu has won the “President’s Science Award” in 2020, which is the highest recognziation of scientific achievement in Singapore, as well as the “Chen Young Investigator Award” from the Human Genome Organization (HUGO) in 2011. He was recognized by Thomson Reuters as one of “The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds” (top 1% of scientists with the highest number of citations globally) in 2015.