Charles Liu, MD, PhD

Professor of Clinical Neurological Surgery, Surgery, Psychiatry and the Behavioral Sciences and Biomedical Engineering

Director, USC Neurorestoration Center

USC Viterbi School of Engineering, Biomedical Engineering

Image of Charles Liu, MD, PhD
Is this your profile? Click to edit

Overview

Dr. Liu completed his undergraduate education in Chemical Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and went on to receive his PhD in Chemical/Biomedical Engineering at Rice University. He then attended the Yale University School of Medicine, receiving his MD degree. He trained in neurosurgery at the University of Southern California Affiliated Hospitals.

He is presently professor of neurosurgery and neurology and holds the Apuzzo Professorship for Advanced Neurosurgery. He is also Director of the USC Center for Neurorestoration, which functions to bring scientific advances in the laboratory and engineers new tools to restore function to the injured and diseased nervous system. He also serves as the Surgical Director of the USC Comprehensive Epilepsy Program, one of the premier and highest volume surgical epilepsy programs in the world.

He has received numerous research awards and made a large number of visitorships/invited lectures throughout the world. He also serves as Associate Editor of the journal, WORLD NEUROSURGERY. He is a principal neurosurgical consultant for the NCAA USC Trojans Athletics Department. In addition, he serves on the Executive Committee of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons. At Rancho los Amigos, Dr. Liu is Chair of the Department of Neurosurgery and is developing cutting-edge programs in restorative neurosurgery, collaborating with scientists at Caltech and USC, among others.

Awards

  • Castle Connolly Medical Ltd.: Top Doctor, 2015
  • Castle Connolly Medical Ltd: Top Doctor, 2011

Publications

  • Functional ultrasound imaging through a human cranial window for mesoscopic mapping of motor effector encoding within the sensorimotor cortex. bioRxiv. 2026 Jul 09.. View in PubMed
  • Real-time brain-computer interface control of walking exoskeleton with bilateral sensory feedback. Brain Stimul. 2026 May-Jun; 19(3):103065.. View in PubMed
  • Rotational ultrasound and photoacoustic tomography of the human body. Nat Biomed Eng. 2026 Jan 16.. View in PubMed
  • Charge density of multi-channel intra-cortical micro-stimulation modulates intensity and naturalness of evoked somatosensations. J Neural Eng. 2025 12 12; 22(6).. View in PubMed
  • Cerebral Perfusion and Blood-Brain Barrier Changes After Cranioplasty: A Diffusion-Prepared Arterial Spin Labeling Study. J Neuroimaging. 2025 Nov-Dec; 35(6):e70106.. View in PubMed
  • Assessing human scalp and brain blood flow sensitivities via superficial temporal artery occlusion using speckle contrast optical spectroscopy. APL Bioeng. 2025 Dec; 9(4):046106.. View in PubMed
  • Visual context affects the perceived timing of tactile sensations elicited through intracortical microstimulation: a case study of two participants. J Neurophysiol. 2025 Nov 01; 134(5):1785-1803.. View in PubMed
  • Promoting arm movement practice with a novel wheelchair armrest early after stroke: A randomized controlled trial. ArXiv. 2025 Oct 02.. View in PubMed
  • Functional ultrasound imaging combined with machine learning for whole-brain analysis of drug-induced hemodynamic changes. Imaging Neurosci (Camb). 2025; 3.. View in PubMed
  • Directional hand movement can be classified from insular cortex SEEG signals using recurrent neural networks and high-gamma band features. Sci Rep. 2025 Aug 16; 15(1):29993.. View in PubMed