Jonathan Liang

Jonathan graduated summa cum laude from Yale University in 2013 with a joint B.S./M.S. degree in Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry. His interest in immunity and systems biology began years earlier, though, when in his final year of high school he worked in the lab of Dr. O'Shea (NIH/NIAMS), helping to understand gene expression changes that drive helper T cell differentiation.

While at Yale, Jonathan explored diverse areas of molecular biology. He joined the laboratory of Dr. Ronald Breaker to study riboswitches, bacterial RNA structures that act as sensors of small molecules and, over two years, discovered and characterized a new riboswitch class. He also spent a summer at the Broad Institute's Cancer Program, implementing an algorithm to identify gene expression "signatures" in cancer cells related to mutation of the oncogene K-RAS. In part due to this research, he was recognized as a Goldwater Scholar in 2012.

After graduating, Jonathan spent a year as a Churchill Scholar in the Computational Biology MPhil course at the University of Cambridge, gaining further experience with computational methods and their applications in the study of genome regulation. He then returned to Yale to begin clinical training, developing a particular interest in pediatrics.

As an NIH-Cambridge Scholar, Jonathan will return to his first interest in immunology, investigating the molecular machinery that allows macrophages to respond to inflammatory stimuli by producing cytokines. He is particularly interested in studying the role of macrophages in responding to non-traditional inflammatory stimuli, such as intracellular pathogens and metabolic dysregulation.