From the wild west to the frontiers of immunology: the journey of a Chinese-American scientist

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Margaret Ann Liu

Margaret Ann Liu. Dr. Liu obtained an M.D. from Harvard Medical School, a B.A. in Chemistry, summa cum laude, from Colorado College, and passed the Epreuve pour le Diplôme d’Enseignement, à l’unanimité (judges’ unanimous decision), in piano from the Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris. She completed Internship and Residency in Internal Medicine and a Fellowship in Endocrinology, all at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School. Previous visiting, faculty, and adjunct faculty appointments were at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard Medical School, and The University of Pennsylvania, respectively. Dr. Liu received an NIH Physician Scientist Award, and served as Senior Director at Merck Research Laboratories, Vice President of Vaccines Research and Gene Therapy at Chiron Corporation, Senior Advisor in Vaccinology at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Vice-Chairman of Transgene, and Executive Vice-Chair of the International Vaccine Institute (IVI), an independent international organization with signatory countries in Seoul, Korea established by UNDP.

Dr. Liu consults in the fields of vaccines and immunotherapy for companies, universities, and non-governmental and scientific governmental organizations, and is a Foreign Adjunct Professor at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, and an Adjunct Full Professor at the University of California, San Francisco. She is the immediate Past-President of the International Society for Vaccines.

Dr. Liu’s expertise is in the use of gene-based vectors for the development of preventions and treatments for infectious diseases and cancer, specifically vaccines and immunotherapeutics. Two of the technologies that she pioneered have now been developed by companies into licensed products: bispecific antibodies for cancer therapy, and DNA vaccines (for veterinary applications and which are in numerous human clinical trials for vaccines-for example, the first two Zika vaccine clinical trials), gene therapy, and immunotherapy for cancer, autoimmune diseases, and allergy.

Dr. Liu was invited by the Nobel Committee to lecture in the Karolinska Research Lecture series, was named one of “The 50 Most Important Women in Science” by Discover magazine, and has received a number of honorary lectureships. She has had the conferral of two honorary doctorates, the most recent being Medical Doctor honoris causa from the Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden in 2017.