Dr. Edison Liu is a medical doctor turned cancer geneticist, whose work focuses on cancer genomics, breast cancer biology, and translational medicine. He has held senior leadership roles in biomedical research institutions in the United States and Asia, as the founding executive director of the Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS), and later the president and CEO of the Jackson Laboratory, one of the world's leading genetics research institutions. Along the way, he helped shape Singapore's biomedical landscape, led genomics research through crises like SARS, and expanded global position medicine efforts across Asia and North America.

In this episode, Dr. Edison Liu shares his journey from being motivated from childhood by medicine, then pivoting into basic science late in training after frustration with empiric cancer care and inspiration from oncogene discoveries, leading to work at UCSF with Nobel laureate J. Michael Bishop. He explains how clinical experience shaped his research questions, how he balanced lab discovery with focused clinical work and molecular trials, and how leading a 1,200-person NCI division taught institutional-scale leadership. Recruited to Singapore by Philip Yeo and others, Liu chose functional and transcriptional genomics over sequencing alone, built GIS’s collaborative culture, recruited fearless, high-performing, non-“jerk” talent, and empowered young leaders during events like SARS, helping establish preeminence within a decade.

Host: John Joson Ng

Editors: Dillon Chew, Hana Maldivita Tambrin, Shamieraah Jamal, Vasilina Gedzun

Chapters: 

02:18 Childhood Doctor Dream

06:00 Deep Dive into Molecular Biology

09:40 The value of being a Clinician Scientist 

15:00 Juggling Clinic Lab And Trials

19:50 Recruited to Singapore

23:00 Leading GIS and Recruiting the right talent

29:40 Culture of GIS