Anli A. Liu, MD

I am a Physician-Researcher in the NYU Langone Comprehensive Epilepsy Center and Center for Cognitive Neurology, Principal Investigator of the NYU Memory and Neuromodulation Laboratory, and Investigator at the NYU Neuroscience Institute.   As a physician, I care for adult patients with epilepsy, with a focus on the cognitive and psychiatric aspects of the disease.  I also see patients with memory and cognitive disorders.   I aim to provide compassionate, thorough, and cutting-edge care to patients, while supporting their families. 

Patient care directly guides and grounds my research program.   Episodic memory dysfunction, or impaired memories for facts and events, is the most common and debilitating cognitive complaint in people with epilepsy and many neurodegenerative disorders.  Seizures and related abnormal electrical activity can “hijack” the brain’s memory circuits, and thus disrupt normal memory function.

My lab’s mission is to translate the insights gained from basic and cognitive neuroscience of memory for clinical benefit.  We employ a variety of tools, including cognitive testing, intracranial and scalp EEG, and neurostimulation to investigate memory.  Our lab’s research goals and accomplishments in the field of epilepsy and neuroscience include:

1. Develop new behavioral tasks and analytical tools to characterize the repertoire of memory functions in everyday life.   We develop cognitive tasks which represent the diverse and complex memory functions that occur (and fail) in real life, which are incompletely captured in conventional neuropsychological tests.
2. Characterize the neurophysiology of memory processing and its disruption in epilepsy patients.  A mechanistic understanding of how and when memory fails in epilepsy patients is needed for development of rationally-guided therapeutic interventions. We utilize scalp and intracranial EEG to characterize how coordinated activity between hippocampus and neocortex support learning, during waking and sleep.  We are particularly interested in how abnormal and normal brain rhythms interact in the brain.
3. Develop methods of neuromodulation to restore neural rhythms supporting memory function and terminate seizures. We are investigating a variety of techniques, including transcranial electrical stimulation, acoustic stimulation, and direct cortical stimulation to modulate physiological and pathological rhythms in the brain.  

Our lab works in close collaboration with a dynamic group of basic scientists, cognitive neuroscientists, biomedical engineers, data scientists, neuropsychologists, and physicians. Our intellectual home is within the NYU Comprehensive Epilepsy Center and the NYU ECoG Group. We belong to a vibrant research community which includes NYU Grossman School of Medicine, NYU Langone's Neuroscience Institute, NYU Center for Neural Science, and the NYU Center for Data Science.