Professor and W. Eugene Stern Chair Chair & Executive Medical Director, Department of Neurosurgery David Geffen School of Medicine & UCLA Health Director, UCLA Brain Tumor SPORE UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center Dr. Linda M. Liau is the W. Eugene Stern Professor & Chair of the Department of Neurosurgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. She is the Co-Director of the UCLA Brain Tumor Center, and Principal Investigator and Director of the NCI-designated UCLA Brain Tumor SPORE (Specialized Program of Research Excellence). She served as a Board Director of the American Board of Neurological Surgery (ABNS) from 2014 to 2020, and was the first woman Chair of the ABNS (2019-2020). She was also the first woman President of the Western Neurosurgical Society (WNS). She received her B.S. degree in Biochemistry and B.A. degree in Political Science, both with honors, from Brown University. She received her M.D. degree from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. degree in Neuroscience from UCLA. After completing her residency and fellowship training in neurosurgery at UCLA, she joined the faculty at the UCLA School of Medicine in 1998. In 2016, she earned an M.B.A. from the UCLA Anderson School of Management. Dr. Liau is a tenured Professor of Neurosurgery and was appointed Chair of the Neurosurgery Department at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA in 2017. She is a board-certified neurosurgeon with an active translational research laboratory in brain tumor immunology and immunotherapy, as well as a busy clinical practice in the field of brain tumors and neurosurgical oncology. Dr. Liau has been the Principal Investigator on several research grants and clinical trials, and her work has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for the past 25 years. She has been the mentor of NIH training grants for residents, fellows, and postdoctoral researchers in her laboratory. Her research interests include translational experimental therapeutics of cell-based immunotherapy for brain tumors and the characterization of biomarkers of response to immune-based therapies. She is internationally recognized for her achievements in understanding the immunobiology of malignant brain tumors and pioneering the use of dendritic cell-based vaccines for glioblastoma. Clinically, she has developed novel ways to map brain function during awake brain tumor surgeries using functional MRI (fMRI) correlates, and specializes in surgery for brain tumors in eloquent areas. Dr. Liau has authored over 255 peer-reviewed research articles, along with several book chapters, and a textbook entitled Brain Tumor Immunotherapy. She is on the editorial boards of several scientific/medical journals and was the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Neuro-Oncology for over a decade (2007–2018). She is an elected member of the American Academy of Neurological Surgery (2013), the National Academy of Medicine (2018), and the Academia Sinica (2024).