Matthew H. Liang is a physician specializing in social rheumatology, Professor of Medicine at

Harvard Medical School Harvard Medical School (HMS) is the graduate medical school of Harvard University and is located in the Longwood Medical Area of Boston, Massachusetts. Founded in 1782, HMS is one of the oldest medical schools in the United States and is consi ...

, Professor of Health Policy and Management at

Harvard School of Public Health The Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health is the public health school of Harvard University, located in the Longwood Medical Area of Boston, Massachusetts. The school grew out of the Harvard-MIT School for Health Officers, the nation's first ...

, and the Director of Special Projects of the Robert B. Brigham Arthritis and Musculoskeletal Diseases Clinical Research Center which he founded. At the

Brigham and Women's Hospital Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) is the second largest teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School and the largest hospital in the Longwood Medical and Academic Area, Longwood Medical Area in Boston, Massachusetts. Along with Massachusetts Gener ...

he is Medical Director of Rehabilitation Services. He is a founding faculty of the Division of General Internal Medicine and Primary Care at the Brigham and Women's Hospital and a founding faculty of the Clinical Effectiveness Program at the Harvard School of Public Health and is a Study Director in the Veterans Administration Cooperative Studies Program. He is the author of ''History of the Robert Breck Brigham Hospital for Incurables: The First Teaching Hospital in America Specializing in Rheumatic and Orthopedic Conditions'', and co-author (with Edward R. Lew) of ''Halsted R. Holman and the Struggle for the Soul of Medicine'' (2022).

Early life

Liang was born in California but grew up in

Guangzhou Guangzhou (, ; ; or ; ), also known as Canton () and alternatively romanized as Kwongchow or Kwangchow, is the capital and largest city of Guangdong province in southern China. Located on the Pearl River about north-northwest of Hong Kon ...

, China. A relative of Liang Qichao and Liang Sicheng, his grandfather originally migrated from the farming village of Jianlong 见龙 ,

Xinhui District Xinhui, alternately romanized as Sunwui and also known as Kuixiang, is an urban district of Jiangmen in Guangdong, China. It grew from a separate city founded at the confluence of the Tan and West Rivers. It has a population of about 735,500, ...

in the province of

Guangdong Guangdong (, ), alternatively romanized as Canton or Kwangtung, is a coastal province in South China on the north shore of the South China Sea. The capital of the province is Guangzhou. With a population of 126.01 million (as of 2020) ...

. His father, Ping Yee Liang, graduated from the first western-styled medical school, the Rockefeller-funded

Peking Union Medical College Peking Union Medical College (), founded in 1906, is a selective public medical college based in Dongcheng, Beijing, China. It is a Chinese Ministry of Education Double First Class University Plan The World First Class University and First ...

in a class of 15 . His mother, Alice Kao, attended NYU Nursing School, and became head nurse in the newborn nursery at Johns Hopkins Hospital where she met Ping Yee. The family returned to China, but then fled in 1949 by truck to Macau and then Hong Kong, eventually settling in the United States. He attended public schools and the

Baltimore Polytechnic Institute The Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, colloquially referred to as BPI, Poly, and The Institute, is a U.S. public high school founded in 1883. Established as an all-male manual trade / vocational school by the Baltimore City Council and the Baltim ...

, leaving before graduation to go to Johns Hopkins University.

Education

After Johns Hopkins, he went to

Dartmouth Medical School The Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth is the graduate medical school of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. The fourth oldest medical school in the United States, it was founded in 1797 by New England physician Nathan Smith. It is o ...

and Harvard Medical School, where he earned his MD in 1969. After house staff training at the

University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota, formally the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, (UMN Twin Cities, the U of M, or Minnesota) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Tw ...

and a locum in the

Grenfell Mission The Grenfell Mission was a philanthropic organization that provided medical and social services to people in rural communities of northern Newfoundland and Labrador. It was founded by Sir Wilfred Grenfell in 1892 as a branch of The Royal National M ...

, he studied tropical public health and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, earning a MPH in 1972. Afterwards, on the Harvard Medical Service at the Boston City Hospital with the encouragement of Dr. Charles Davidson, he spent part of his residency as the founding internist of a neighborhood health center in Roxbury and worked with Roger Mark, a champion for inner city patients. Mark and Liang developed a Nursing Home Telemedicine system for over 400 residents of five nursing homes and showed that nurse practitioners could provide effective, economic care.

Career

Major Liang served in the US Army Medical Corps. He implemented the Army's algorithm-based physician extender program (AMOSIST), and the first training program in general internal medicine and a chronic disease nurse practitioner program at Walter Reed Hospital. He also helped design the computerized hospital information system. After the service, he was a Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar and a rheumatology fellow with Halsted Holman at Stanford. In 1977 Liang was recruited to build a new NIH multipurpose arthritis center program at the old Robert Brigham Hospital and as a founding member of the new Division of Primary Care and General Medicine at the Peter Bent Brigham by K. Frank Austen, H. R. Nesson and Eugene Braunwald. The center became focused on population-based research and pursued several lines of etiologic and methodologic research. In the 80s, Liang and Martin Larson, Lawren Daltroy, and Bob Lew were asked to take responsibility for clinical research training in arthritis and musculoskeletal diseases. The program and others like it became a model for the National Institutes of Health pathway for clinician scientists.Shulman LE. Clinical research 1996: stirrings from the academic health centers. Acad Med. 1996 Apr;71(4):362-3, 398. PMID 8645401; DOI:10. 1097/00001888-199604000-00013 The trainees came from 8 countries; many went on to become leaders in their own right.

References

Sources

# # # #Liu Chang, Union Medical College building a century: science and humanity. Sanlian Life Weekly 40: 82-94, 2017. # # # # # # # # {{DEFAULTSORT:Liang, Matthew H. Living people American people of Chinese descent Johns Hopkins University alumni Harvard Medical School alumni Geisel School of Medicine alumni Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health alumni Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health faculty Geisel School of Medicine faculty American rheumatologists People from Santa Monica, California Chinese Civil War refugees American expatriates in China 1944 births