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Dr. Linda M. Liau is Professor and Interim Chair of the Department of Neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and Director of the UCLA Brain Tumor Center. She received her B.S. degree in Biochemistry and B.A. degree in Political Science, both with honors, from Brown University at the age of 19. She then received her M.D. degree from Stanford University in 1991, a Ph.D. degree in Neuroscience from UCLA in 1999. After completing her residency and fellowship training in neurosurgery at UCLA, she joined the faculty at the UCLA School of Medicine. Dr. Liau is now a tenured Professor of Neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. She is currently a board-certified neurosurgeon with both an active research laboratory and a busy clinical practice in the field of brain tumors and neurosurgical oncology. She also has a M.B.A. from the UCLA Anderson School of Management.
Dr. Liau has been the Principal Investigator on several NIH research grants over the past 20 years, and is the mentor for several NIH training grants for residents, fellows, and postdoctoral researchers in her laboratory. Her research interests include translational experimental therapeutics of cell-based immunotherapy and gene therapies for brain tumors and characterization of molecular targets involved in brain tumor pathogenesis and progression. Clinically, she has developed novel ways to map brain function during awake brain tumor surgeries, and is an internationally recognized expert in intra-operative brain mapping for brain tumors. She is the lead investigator on various novel clinical trials for brain cancer patients, and developed one of the first human applications of a personalized brain tumor vaccine (DCVax-L®), which is currently being tested in multi-center clinical trials in the United States and Europe. Dr. Liau has authored over 140 peer-reviewed research articles, along with several book chapters, and a textbook entitled Brain Tumor Immunotherapy. She is on the editorial boards of several scientific/medical journals and is the current Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Neuro-Oncology. She was President of the Western Neurosurgical Society (WNS), and currently serves on the Nominating Committee of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons (AANS) and as a Director of the American Board of Neurological Surgeons (ABNS).