2004-2008        Ph.D., Department of Chemistry, University of Chicago, Chicago

2001-2004        Master, Department of Chemistry, Tulane University, New Orleans

1996-2001        Bachelor, Department of Neuroscience and biophysics, University of Science and Technology of China

 

Our research group will work at the interface of chemistry and biology aiming to solve biological problems with chemical means. Our research fields include peptide engineering and microbiology.
 1. Peptide engineering
 Protein-protein interactions(PPIs) are generally viewed as undruggable targets for drug discovery and most of PPIs involves short helical peptides less than 15 amino acid residues. Our research will focus on peptide engineering strategies aims at targets directly related with human diseases, with focuses on infectious diseases and human cancers. Our research group  studies biological functions and working mechanisms of important protein targets by chemically stabilized peptides. Based on structural and/or computational evidences, we are developing stabilized peptides which may have pharmaceutical applications to interrupt target protein interactions with their partners.

2. Microbiology
Another focus of Our research is to understand and regulate the virulence of human pathogens. Parallel to the above mentioned peptide engineering efforts towards developing peptide/protein inhibitors, we also try to find small molecule inhibitors for important targets with broad implications in human pathogens. Both rational designs based on structural and/or computational evidences and high throughput screening approaches against small molecule library will be applied for these purposes.