Dr. Linda Liau, chair of neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, has been elected as an academician of Academia Sinica, Taiwan’s equivalent of the National Academy of Sciences.
The neurosurgeon and scientist is being recognized for her seminal scientific contributions to the field of brain tumor immunotherapy. Her pioneering work in developing and refining treatment strategies for brain tumors has led to one of the first personalized vaccines for people with glioblastoma, an aggressive and fast-growing type of brain tumor.
Liau and her team were among the first to demonstrate that the body could mount an immune response against tumors in the brain following vaccination, indicating that T cells can cross the blood-brain barrier and attack tumors in the brain. The vaccine has added years of life for some of the patients in Liau’s studies.
An investigator in the UCLA Health Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center and director of the UCLA Brain Tumor Program, Liau is among 28 new scholars and scientists elected to the academy in a wide variety of disciplines, including the humanities, social sciences, life sciences and physical sciences.
Read more about Liau at the UCLA Health website.
