Ronglih Liao studied hard as a teenager in Taiwan, but science was just one among many wide-ranging interests. At age 17, however, her focus abruptly became clear when her father was diagnosed with lung cancer, eventually leading Liao to a career in basic science with the potential to translate understanding into therapies for both rare and common cardiovascular diseases. After obtaining a chemistry degree, Liao fulfilled a promise to her late father to obtain an advanced degree overseas. For her PhD thesis at the University of Alabama Birmingham, she examined the interaction of troponin I with troponin C in bovine cardiac muscle.1 Then, Liao was recruited by 2 amazing mentors with independent laboratories and complementary expertise, Drs Judith Gwathmey and Joanne S. Ingwall, to undertake a collaborative project in cardiac physiology and myocardial energetics at Harvard Medical School. At the time, the concept that failing hearts were energy-starved was not yet accepted, and Liao deployed P31 nuclear magnetic resonance to detect decreased energy reserve in a model of dilated cardiomyopathy—baggy and sick turkey hearts—and establish its relationship to contractile performance.2 Liao set up her first independent laboratory at the Boston University School of Medicine, where she benefited from the university’s status as an internationally recognized center for the study of amyloidosis. Perfusing human immunoglobulin light chain proteins (amyloid precursors) into mouse heart, her laboratory was the first to demonstrate what the amyloidosis experts at Boston University had suspected—that amyloid light chain proteins were cardiotoxic and contributed directly to the pathogenesis and rapid progression of amyloid cardiomyopathy, independent of fibril formation and deposition.3 In 2005, Liao moved to Harvard Medical School, where she is now professor of medicine. At Brigham and Women’s Hospital, she directs the Cardiac Muscle Research Laboratory (since 2005), the Cardiovascular Flow Cytometry Core …