Ying Liu, PhD
Assistant Professor
Institute of Cancer Research
Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research
Northwell Health
Email: yliu29@northwell.edu
Principal Investigator
Ying Liu is an Assistant Professor at Northwell Health. His laboratory studies how localized disease reshapes physiology across the whole organism, with a particular focus on cancer cachexia, systemic metabolism, and tumor–host communication.
During his postdoctoral training with Dr. Norbert Perrimon at Harvard Medical School, he developed whole-organism approaches to cancer biology, including whole-body single-nucleus RNA sequencing and cross-species studies of systemic metabolic mechanisms. His work has uncovered conserved pathways linking tumor-derived signals to dysfunction in distant organs and highlighted therapeutically actionable mechanisms in cancer cachexia.
He earned his PhD in Genetics from the University of Helsinki in Finland, where he studied nutrient sensing and growth control. His doctoral research identified PWP1 as a regulator of cancer cell proliferation and showed that elevated PWP1 expression is associated with poor prognosis in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC).
His laboratory now combines whole-organism biology, evolutionary conservation, and cross-species experimentation to identify fundamental mechanisms of systemic disease and translate them into new opportunities for human health.
The lab is growing.
We are building a collaborative team to understand how disease reshapes the body. Trainees will work across genetics, organism-wide genomics, computation, metabolism, and cross-species disease models.
Learn about joining the lab