Current Research Interests

Ms. Liang’s primary collaboration is with the Women’s Environment, Cancer, and Radiation Epidemiology (WECARE) study group. She has served as an informatics specialist at the coordinating center of the WECARE study since its inception. The WECARE study is a large international 22-center molecular epidemiological study of breast cancer headed by Dr. Bernstein. The primary objective of the study is to investigate gene-environment interactions in the etiology of breast cancer. The study’s aims are to establish a repository of biologic specimens, epidemiologic risk factor information, radiation and treatment records, and to utilize this unique repository in order to investigate the mechanisms and nature of gene-gene and gene-environment interactions that may influence susceptibility to breast cancer. Since 1999, she has been responsible for all aspects of the informatics related activities of the study, namely centralized information system development, data management, database design and implementation, data summaries, statistics and report generation. She is responsible for keeping the WECARE data safe and generating new data sets for different analyses according to investigators’ concept proposals.

Ms. Liang is also involved in other studies such as the IMAGINE (for IMAGINg and Epidemiology) Study examining background parenchymal enhancement (BPE) as seen on MRI as a biomarker of breast cancer risk.

Ms. Liang’s research interests lie in the design of centralized information systems for large-scale, multicenter, multidiscipline studies, data modeling, database design, data management and data analysis.