YOUTUBE, TED

Xu Liu, a newly appointed assistant professor of neurobiology at Northwestern University best known for his work manipulating mouse memories using optogenetics, has died. He was 37.

A native of Shanghai, Liu’s early interest in science stemmed from his collecting centipedes, beetles, and locusts as a child. He earned an undergraduate degree in biology at Fudan University in Shanghai and completed his doctoral research, focused on fruit fly memory, with Ron Davis at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas.

As a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Susumu Tonegawa at MIT, Liu and graduate student Steve Ramirez used optogenetic techniques to identify the neurons involved in encoding fear memories in mice. In a follow-up study, Liu and Ramirez used their understanding of fear memory formation to create a false fear memory of a harmless location. The work generated great scientific and public interest. The...