Speaker Profile
Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Northwestern U.
Biography
Yaping Liu, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. He joined Northwestern in 2023 after founding his laboratory at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, where he served as an Assistant Professor in the Divisions of Human Genetics and Biomedical Informatics from 2019 to 2023. Prior to his academic career, Dr. Liu was a Principal Computational Biologist at Freenome Inc., where he led computational efforts to develop liquid-biopsy technologies for early cancer detection. He completed his postdoctoral training at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in 2017. Dr. Liu received his PhD in Genetics, Molecular and Cellular Biology from the University of Southern California in 2014 and his BS in Biotechnology from Nanjing University in 2008.
Session Abstract – PMWC 2027 Silicon Valley
Track Chair:
Victor Velculescu, Johns Hopkins
PMWC Award Ceremony
• Rebecca Fitzgerald, University of Cambridge (Luminary)
• Mary-Claire King, University of Washington (Pioneer)
• Nickolas Papadopoulos, Johns Hopkins (Pioneer)
Featured Speakers
• Mary-Claire King, University of Washington
• Rebecca Fitzgerald, University of Cambridge
• Nickolas Papadopoulos, Johns Hopkins
• Victor Velculescu, Johns Hopkins
• Phil Castle, NIH
• Elad Ziv, UCSF
• Ash Alizadeh, Stanford
• Hamed Amini, Hepta
• Becky Taub, Madrigal Pharmaceuticals
• Trevor Pugh, University of Toronto
• Doga Gulhan, Harvard
• Pranav Rajpurkar, Harvard
• Chris Douville, Johns Hopkins
• Sylvia Katina Plevritis, UCSF
In Precision Medicine, Almost All Diseases Are Genetically Rare
A genetics-first keynote framing risk, prevention, and actionability.
The Reckoning
What the first wave of early detection got right and wrong.
The End of One Size Fits All
Risk-stratified screening, high-risk populations, and single-cancer tests.
Treating Disease at the Earliest Stage
Where detection and therapeutic interception begin to converge.
Pre-Cancer Detection & the Liver Disease Frontier
cfDNA and clinical action across the liver-disease-to-cancer continuum.
AI Across Multimodal Signals
Fragmentomics, methylation, imaging, pathology, and integration: hype versus real science.
PMWC Hall of Impact
Previous Speakers Include
Nobel laureates, technology founders, regulators, CEOs and scientific pioneers who have taken the PMWC stage.
