Benjamine Liu is a computational biologist, neuroscientist, healthcare technologist, and Rhodes Scholar at the Translational Neuroscience and Dementia Research Group at Oxford. Ben is interested in leveraging developments in big data, sequencing, and personalized medicine to improve diagnosis and treatment for patients suffering from neurological disorders. Ben recently developed a candidate blood test for Parkinson's Disease that he hopes will allow for earlier diagnosis. He is currently involved in projects that aim to use multimodal approaches such as genomics, proteomics, transcriptomics, imaging, and machine learning to better understand the etiology of neurodegenerative disorders--something that requires the sharing of large data sets and patient samples. He has recently represented the Global Shapers Community at the World Economic Forum's Annual Meeting of New Champions in Science and Technology and will be a Salzburg Global Fellow attending the session on Big Data in Healthcare.

Ben received his MPhil in Computational Biology with Distinction from the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge University where he was a Paul Mellon Fellow at Clare College. For his thesis, he used proteomic screens and machine-leaning based approaches to develop diagnostic tests for Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease. Ben graduated with an Intensive B.S in Biology from Yale where he was awarded the college's highest honor, the Alpheus Henry Snow Prize, the Goldwater Scholarship, and the Josephine de Karman Fellowship. He has also worked on service projects in the US and around the world.

Outside of research, Ben is interested in enhancing public engagement and participation in research studies. Ben is CEO and co-founder at TrialSpark which uses big data, analytics and social media campaigns to expedite clinical trial recruitment and facilitate patient engagement. See TrialSpark for more details. He has also created a free human subjects research tool, ResearchWe, that helps researchers crowdsource participants for studies.