In Memoriam: Long time faculty remembered for big smile, CBQB, passion
block Heading link
Richard and Loan Hill Professor, UIC Distinguished Professor, and Director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Quantitative Biology Jie Liang passed away December 23, 2024. He was 60.
Liang joined the biomedical engineering department in 1999. He was at the time one of three faculty members in the department. He quickly went to work improving and growing the field at UIC, including leading the formation of both the PhD and MS degree programs in Bioinformatics at UIC, among the earliest such programs in the nation. The programs received IBHE approval in 2003.
Meishan Lin, a BME clinical assistant professor, former PhD student of Liang’s, and associate director of the CBQB, shared that Liang once explained that he saw himself as an unusual pick for the department at the time of his hire because he wasn’t a biomedical engineer by training.
Liang received his bachelor’s in biophysics at Fudan University in Shanghai, China, and his MS in computer science and PhD in biophysics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“I think Department Head Richard Magin, at that time, saw the potential of his bioinformatics and computational biology research interests,” Lin said. “So, in Jie’s mind, that was a pretty big risk. It ended up being a very high-reward risk that the department took.”
The bioinformatics master’s and PhD degrees program creation brought the establishment of research labs in bioinformatics, which was unconventional at the time among BME departments. Liang was the visionary and pioneer behind the UIC Center for Bioinformatics and Quantitative Biology.
“It was more the faculty, especially Jie, who identified the importance of having this center to bring everyone doing bioinformatics and quantitative biology together,” Lin said. “We wanted to serve as a community and communications hub for people. We knew what we wanted to accomplish such as offering seminar series, a student journal club, and organizing a research day, those all came from our discussions showing what will be the most important things to do. We’re still carrying on these activities now.”
As a devoted researcher, Liang was known for his successful leadership, research grants, level of knowledge, expertise, insight, passion, open-mindedness, and positive attitude.
“Jie was a real scholar, an exceptional colleague, a true professional and a wonderful human being,” said collaborator Simon Kasif, professor of biomedical engineering, bioinformatics, and computer science at Boston University in Massachusetts.
College of Medicine Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics Assistant Professor Konstantinos Chronis, a BME affiliate faculty, and a long-time collaborator of Liang’s, shared that not long before Liang passed away, he and Liang received the U.S. Department of Energy Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) award for the second time. The INCITE award is designed to enable researchers to pursue transformational advances in science and engineering and provides access to equipment from Argonne National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
“I have certainly learned from Jie’s grace, his big smile, and love of learning,” Chronis said. “Jie was a phenomenal educator. A number of his students from the lab have gone on to do great things after graduating with the way he shaped their academic thinking and problem-solving. But, the current generation of students I’ve seen, they try to approach things in the same graciousness as he did in the same open and accepting attitude that he had.”
“That, I believe, is a lasting legacy for him because when you see how people approach problems and you see him in them, it speaks volumes,” Chronis said.
Prior to joining UIC, Liang worked in industry for a few years as an investigator for SmithKline Beecham Pharmaceuticals in the department of cheminformatics in King Prussia, Pennsylvania.
Lin explained that Liang had told her how he was always so interested in research and even when he was working for this company, he would work on research on his own at night. He said he never really stopped doing research and even though he had an industry position, he kept pursuing an academic faculty position.
Liang also was a visiting professor at Shanghai Jiaotong University Institute of Systems Biomedicine in Shanghai, China, and the University of Tokyo Department of Mechanical Engineering in Japan.
Lin also shared about a student who was taking a few of Jie’s classes and applied to UIC because of what he had heard about Jie’s work, when he was still a student in China. This student came to UIC specifically because he knew about the success and this good scholarship of Jie. That, itself, speaks a lot about how impactful he is, not just in UIC or Chicago, but for the U.S. as well.
During his career Professor Liang mentored MS, postdoctoral and more than two dozen PhD and MD/PhD students, some who went on to follow in his footsteps becoming faculty members at universities, including Columbia University, Washington University, Florida State University and UIC. Jie’s research over the years was consistently supported by NIH, as well as NSF, ONR, and many other sources. He authored hundreds of archival technical publications that have been cited about 15,000 times with more than 1,000 citations in 2024 alone. Jie was involved in many professional journal editorships and was a fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. He chaired a major international IEEE Biomedical and Health Informatics Conference held at the UIC Forum in 2019.
book Heading link
“I just was so impressed with him as a faculty member, as a scientist, and as a human being, he was a wonderful person,” said Pete Nelson, a professor of computer science at UIC, Liang’s faculty mentor, and the former dean of UIC’s College of Engineering. “He was someone that was always positive, even under difficult circumstances, and always had a good sense of humor. He didn’t take himself too seriously, even though he was, in my opinion, usually the smartest person in the room and not only that, but the nicest person in the room too.”
“With Jie, I knew I was talking with someone who was not only brilliant, but also wise and compassionate,” said Tom Royston, professor and department head of biomedical engineering. “He was someone who measured his success not by what he accomplished as an individual, but by what we accomplished together, when that sometimes meant me or the bioinformatics faculty or the entire department, or sometimes the graduate students in bioinformatics whom he mentored and cherished. It also sometimes meant the broader group of faculty and students across UIC within the Center for Bioinformatics and Quantitative Biology, which he created and led.”
A memorial service to remember and celebrate the life of Jie Liang will be held Friday, February 21, at 11 a.m. at the Student Services Building East Atrium and Conference Rooms B/C. Please RSVP here by February 17 at 5 p.m. if you plan on attending.