Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and one traveler, Bo Liu, DDS, PhD, stood. Robert Frost’s poem "The Road Not Taken" is oddly fitting for Liu’s career path. After graduating with a degree in dentistry, she asked herself: should she stay in private practice or “take the road less traveled” toward an uncertain future, but a topic she was passionate about?

Liu is currently a senior research scientist at Stanford Medicine's Department of Surgery, leading pioneering work in plastic and reconstructive surgery. However, her story didn’t begin in a wet lab.

As a young girl, Liu aspired to be a doctor. But when her brother went to medical school, her parents nudged Liu towards dentistry instead, reasoning that the siblings should pursue different professional paths.

Treating patients day after day, Liu kept running into the same dead end: dentistry could do very little for serious oral diseases. So, when she had the opportunity to be a visiting scholar in Japan, she was excited to explore the different nuances of dentistry. While working in the Department of Oral Pathology at Niigata University, she interacted with the PhD students and knew the lab was where she belonged.

Liu completed her PhD in Oral Pathology at Peking University and eventually travelled to the United States to pursue postdoctoral training. She was welcomed into the research group of Dr. Jill Helms, a fellow dentist, where she and the rest of the team studied bone regeneration.

This work caught the eye of a venture capital firm, which led to a start-up company. Alongside Helms, Liu worked at that startup for five years. In 2021, she returned to Stanford, continuing her work with Helms as a senior research scientist.

Recently, her team’s focus has switched from studying hard tissue to gathering more data on soft tissue, including the junction epithelium, which is a soft tissue surrounding the tooth. Liu and her team have already tested their findings on rats, and they hope to translate their findings to humans in the future.

Read her most recent publication in the Journal of Dental Research: Epithelial Rests of Malassez Form a Wnt-Dependent Mechanoresponsive Network