Lawrence Liao

Associate Professor, Graduate School of Biosphere Science in Hiroshima University, Japan and President, Association of Systematic Biologists of the Philippines

Dr. Lawrence Liao is currently associate professor at the Graduate School of Biosphere Science in Hiroshima University. He is also the President of the Association of Systematic Biologists of the Philippines.

He took up marine biology at the University of San Carlos and joining the teaching staff thereafter. At USC he was able to get a research fellowship grant, where he spent a year studying the seaweed flora of the Cuyo Islands, Palawan at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

When he pursued his Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he studied the morphological and genetic diversity of red seaweeds (including one new species he and his professor discovered and named Gracilariopsis carolinensis from the southeastern U.S.) and had the opportunity to explore the reefs of the Florida Keys on several occasions.

When he came back to the Philippines, he held teaching and research positions in De La Salle University and the Zamboanga State College of Marine Science and Technology under grants provided by the Commission on Higher Education while traveling around Southeast Asia to do collaborative projects (and countless diving opportunities) resulting to a number of joint publications.

He also spent a sabbatical year teaching at the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada. His most engaging involvement was in cave research on a joint project with the Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research of the National University of Singapore which surveyed the rich aquatic fauna of Bohol and Panglao anchialine caves.

Among the several new discoveries of cave crustaceans, a new endemic species of cardinal shrimp (Caridina liaoi) was named for him.

(Biosketch courtesy of Filipino Cave Divers. Visit their site at filipinocavedivers,com