Jen Liou UT Southwestern Medical Center Dallas, USA

Jen Liou is an Associate Professor of Physiology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, USA. She studied lymphocyte activation and graduated with a Ph.D. from the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF), USA. She conducted her postdoctoral research at Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, USA, where she identified STIM1 and STIM2 as the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) Ca²⁺ sensors for the store-operated Ca²⁺ entry (SOCE) pathway. In addition, she demonstrated that STIM1 dynamically localizes to ER-plasma membrane (PM) contact sites to activate SOCE following ER Ca²⁺ depletion. Dr. Liou received an Endowed Scholar Award and joined the faculty of UT Southwestern in 2009. Research in her lab is focused on signaling at ER-PM contact sites. Her lab has pioneered approaches to study these submicrometer-sized contact sites using proteomic analysis and advanced imaging techniques including live-cell confocal microscopy, super-resolution microscopy, and electron microscopy using the APEX2 tag. Dr. Liou’s lab has since identified several new proteins including E-Syt1 and Nir2 that localize at ER-PM contact sites to regulate lipid homeostasis. Overall, her studies have opened up many new research directions including development of markers for investigating contact sites formed between the ER and other organelles, identification of novel functions at ER-PM contact sites, and characterization of crosstalk between ER-PM contact sites and various cytoskeletons.

Institutional Page: https://profiles.utsouthwestern.edu/profile/111270/jen-liou.html