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).
In 1977 Liang was recruited to build a new NIH Multipurpose Arthritis Center program at the 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. The trainees came from 8 countries; many went on to become leaders in their own right.