Bian Liu, PhD

Dr. Liu is a chronic disease epidemiologist with cross-disciplinary training and expertise in environmental health, epidemiology, and biostatistics. The three key areas of Dr. Liu’s research are environmental exposures, such as air pollution, heat stress, and neighborhood factors, health behaviors, such as health services utilization, smoking, diet, physical activity, and technology use, and health outcomes, such as cancer, dementia, and asthma. Taking an integrated ecological perspective, Dr. Liu investigates the interplay of environmental exposures, health behaviors, and health outcomes across individual, community, and society levels.

Dr. Liu’s research also takes a life-course approach to understand the interactions between environmental exposures, health behaviors and health outcomes along the disease prevention and control continuum and across the life course. To uncover these complex relationships, she applies a wide array of statistical, geospatial, and machine learning methods (e.g., cluster analysis, propensity score methods, latent variable models, random forest, scan statistics, geographic weighted regression, and Bayesian hierarchical models) to large databases (e.g., population-based health surveys, health insurance claims data, cancer registry data, census data, healthcare resources, pollution, weather, and built-environment data).

Building on her solid interdisciplinary and methodological expertise, Dr. Liu has successfully secured and managed independent intramural and extramural research grants while spearheading productive interdisciplinary collaborations.

View Dr. Liu's Publications in PubMed

View Dr. Liu's Publications in GoogleScholar

Teaching activities: BIO 6100 Fundamentals of Epidemiology; Introduction to the use of healthcare databases for population health research.