Jackson Lab's president and CEO will step down next February

Courtesy / The JACKSON LABORATORY Jackson Laboratory CEO Ed Liu will step down next February.

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By Staff

The president and CEO of the Jackson Laboratory, a nonprofit biomedical research institution headquartered in Bar Harbor, plans to step down from those roles in February 2022.

Dr. Edison Liu, who has led the internationally prominent lab since 2012, plans to remain at JAX as a professor, and will continue to lead a team of investigators studying cancer genomics with a focus on breast cancer, according to a news release.

He will also continue serving as the director of the lab’s National Cancer Institute-designated Cancer Center until a leadership transition can be completed.

JAX has already started the search for Liu's successor, and has published a call for candidates for the position of president and CEO.

Liu is a 2021 Mainebiz Business Leader of the Year.

Under his leadership, JAX expanded from 1,300 employees to 2,400 at all its sites and grew its yearly grant funding from $65 million to $108 million last year. The lab also produces specialized mice in Ellsworth for medical research, and ships 3.4 million of them annually to 20,000 laboratories around the world.

In 2020, Liu led JAX’s initiatives responding to the pandemic, including the initiative of a large-scale in-vitro fertilization program to produce a COVID-19 mouse colony large enough to meet global demand from treatment and vaccine developers. Liu mobilized senior management to pivot capabilities as a COVID-19 test site, created a high-throughput process for testing specimens, created testing regimes at other organizations, and donated PPE and specimen collection kits.

Today, the lab has conducted over 1 million tests, produced additional COVID-19 mouse models, and is partnering with Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention to help detect variants of the novel coronavirus.

Before joining JAX, Liu served for 10 years as the founding executive director of the Genome Institute of Singapore, where he led Singapore's scientific response to the 2003 SARS crisis.

Liu also served as president of the Human Genome Organization from 2007-2013. Between 1997 and 2001, he was the scientific director of the National Cancer Institute's Division of Clinical Sciences in Bethesda, Md.