Kung-Yee Liang (Chinese: 梁賡義; pinyin: Liáng Gēng yí; born September 7, 1951) is a Taiwanese biostatistician best known for co-developing the generalized estimating equations (GEE) methodology with Scott Zeger in 1986. This statistical approach, published in the paper "Longitudinal data analysis using generalized linear models" in Biometrika, provides a pragmatic framework for analyzing correlated longitudinal and clustered data, and has become widely used in public health and clinical research.
Education and Career
Liang earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics from National Tsing Hua University in 1973. He then moved to the United States, where he received a master's degree in statistics from the University of South Carolina in 1979. In 1982, he completed his PhD in biostatistics at the University of Washington under the supervision of Norman Breslow, with a dissertation titled "The Asymptotic Equivalence of Conditional and Unconditional Inference Procedures."
That same year, Liang joined the Department of Biostatistics at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where he became a full professor in 1991 and remained until 2010. During his tenure, he also served as Graduate Program Director of the department from 1996 to 2003.
In 2010, Liang returned to Taiwan and transitioned from research to administrative leadership. He served as president of National Yang-Ming University from 2010 to 2017 and as president of the National Health Research Institutes (NHRI) from 2017 to 2022. He had previously served as acting president of NHRI in 2006. Since February 2023, he has been Distinguished Chair Professor at Feng Chia University, and in December 2023 he was elected chairman of OBI Pharma, Inc.
Awards and Recognition
Liang has received numerous honors throughout his career, including:
- George W. Snedecor Award from the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (1987)
- Rema Lapouse Award from the American Public Health Association (2010)
- Karl Pearson Prize from the International Statistical Institute (2015)
- Presidential Science Prize of Taiwan (2025), the country's highest honor for scientific research
He was elected a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 1995, an academician of the Academia Sinica in 2002, a fellow of The World Academy of Sciences in 2012, and a member of the National Academy of Medicine in 2015. He has also received the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Dean's Medal in recognition of his contributions to public health, medical research, and education worldwide.
