Career Plans: Glaucoma Fellowship, Wills Eye Hospital, Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia, PA

Dr. Wendy Liu graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University with a degree in Molecular Biology and certificates in biophysics, materials science and engineering. She received several awards for excellence in academics and research, including the Shapiro Award for Academic Excellence, the American Society for Microbiology Undergraduate Research Fellowship, and the Sigma Xi Book Award for the best senior thesis. She subsequently earned her MD with honors from Harvard Medical School in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology, and PhD in Neurobiology from Harvard University. At Harvard, she was awarded the Presidential Scholarship and Martha Gray Prize for Excellence in Research. She was selected to receive a Howard Hughes Medical Institute research fellowship for her PhD work, which led to the discovery of novel thermosensory and olfactory circuits in the fruit fly using in vivo electrophysiology. She has published first-author articles in journals including New England Journal of Medicine, Nature, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Current Biology. She serves as a reviewer for several ophthalmology journals. She is committed to caring for underserved populations, and has served on the board of directors of a non-profit organization that provides services for immigrants, and has volunteered on a medical trip to rural China. In the future, she hopes to be a physician-scientist and expand the possibilities for ophthalmic intervention through research on disease mechanisms and treatment.