Feng Liu, PhD, was a father to a daughter of whom he was enormously proud, a husband of thirty-one years, a lover of dogs and a lover of ribs, a fan of the Tar Heels and the Steelers, and a brilliant scientist with an NIH-funded research program and a paper that has been cited approximately 1,300 times.
Liu came to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the summer of 2005 as a research associate professor. He was a colleague and collaborator of Leaf Huang, PhD, and was part of a team that came south from the University of Pittsburgh to join the faculty of the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy’s Division of Molecular Pharmaceutics.
The small family settled in Durham’s Hope Valley where Liu and his wife enjoyed regular evening walks around the neighborhood. Liu indulged his love of food—growing it, grilling it, eating it—but he always stayed thin. His wife accepted a job at “that other school,” which inevitably led to good-natured bickering every basketball season.
Liu’s research focused on delivering gene therapy and drugs to cells with an emphasis on the treatment of cancer. He was the author of forty-five peer-reviewed papers and ten book chapters and reviews, and he held four patents. Liu’s work exploring the use of nanocrystals to treat multidrug-resistant cancer was funded by the National Institutes of Health through 2016. He was promoted to research professor in 2012.
He was well known for his work in developing a hydrodynamic technique for introducing nucleic acids into animal cells—a process known as transfection—during his doctoral studies. This methodology is used worldwide, and the Gene Therapy article describing the breakthrough has been cited approximately 1,300 times since it was published in 1999.
Born March 28, 1955, Liu lived much of his life in Shenyang, the capital city of Liaoning Province and the largest city in northeastern China. He was a middle child with an older and a younger sister. He attended Shenyang Pharmaceutical University from 1978 to 1982. After earning a bachelor’s degree in pharmacy, he worked as a research associate at the university before returning to the classroom at Shenyang to pursue a master’s degree in pharmaceutics, which he received in 1988.
Liu married and started a family in Shenyang but almost didn’t. He was so nervous before a blind date that he suffered a panic attack and backed out of the first meeting with the woman who would become his wife. He regrouped. The second attempt was much more successful and led to marriage in 1983 and the birth of a daughter in 1985 who would go on to graduate from the UNC School of Medicine.
In 1993, Liu came to the United States as a visiting scientist at the University of Pittsburgh. He began work on a PhD in pharmaceutics at Pitt in 1996 and earned his doctorate three years later. He then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Pitt School of Pharmacy’s Center for Pharmacogenetics and joined the center as an instructor in 2001 before being promoted to research assistant professor in 2002. In 2004 he was the recipient of an NIH Career Development Award.
Although he had been in the U.S. for more than twenty years, Liu retained strong ties to China. He had served as a guest professor at Xi’an Jiaotong University in Xi’an since 2004 and at his alma mater, Shenyang, since 2008.
If you asked him what his greatest accomplishment was, he probably wouldn’t even think to mention that Gene Therapy paper that everyone else talks about. Instead he might have told you that over the past five years on his nightly walks with his wife he had found four lost dogs and successfully returned them to their owners.
Liu is survived by his wife, who is a research analyst at Duke University, and his daughter, who is a physician in Asheville, North Carolina.