Qi Liu
PhD, Biomedical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University
Research interests include: omics, single-cell transcriptomics, single-cell multimomics integration, genomics, epigenomics, transcriptional and post-transcriptional regulation, enhancer-mediated regulation
Liu’s research focuses on integrating multi-omics data to address fundamental biological questions. She develops tools and algorithms to mine genomics, transcriptomics, epigenomics and single-cell data, find the connection between different molecular layers, and bridge the gaps between vast amounts of omics data and biology.
On an international level, Liu has served as the principal investigator on multiple projects. She is currently co-investigator on U01 and U54 studies supported by the NIH’s National Cancer Institute, as well as co–principal Investigator on a Crohn’s Disease project with funding from the Helmsley Trust. She holds leadership positions on four additional active NIH grants. She is the Academic Editor of PeerJ: The Journal of Life & Environmental Sciences, and a reviewer for more than a dozen other publications, including high-impact journals such as Bioinformatics, Nucleic Acids Research, and Nature Communications. She has herself contributed to more than 100 papers accepted by peer-reviewed journals; she was first author on 24 of these, and corresponding author on 13 (as of September 2021).
At Vanderbilt, Liu has been entrusted with several prominent leadership roles, including Director of the Omics Coordinating Center at the Center for Quantitative Sciences (CQS; since 2018) and Technical Director of Vanderbilt Technologies for Advanced Genomics Analysis and Research Design (VANGARD; since 2018). She has organized CQS’s Bioinformatics & Biostatistics Workshop since 2013 and taught in its Summer Institute since 2015. Her research duties have included supervising, mentoring, and advising analytical staff members, visiting scholars and students, postdocs, and graduate students in both the Biostatistics and Biomedical Informatics Departments. She has served on our faculty search committee and graduate admissions committee, was commended for producing CQS’s Best Presentation in the Bioinformatics & Biostatistics Workshop in 2015, won our department's Best Methodology Paper Award in 2019 and 2022, and the Patrick G. Arbogast Collaborative Publication Award in 2022.