David R. LiuHoward Hughes Medical Institute InvestigatorProfessor of Chemistry
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David R. Liu is Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University, a Harvard College Professor, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, and an Associate Member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. Liu was born in 1973 in Riverside, California. He performed research on sterol biosynthesis under Professor E. J. Corey's guidance throughout his undergraduate years. Liu graduated ranked first in his class at Harvard in 1994 with a bachelor's degree in chemistry before entering the Ph.D. program at U. C. Berkeley. In the group of Professor Peter Schultz, Liu studied tRNAs and the enzymes that aminoacylate them, and initiated the first general effort to expand the genetic code in living cells. He earned his Ph.D. in chemistry in 1999 and became Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University in the same year. Liu has taught more than 2,000 undergraduates and graduate students in the classroom over the past ten years, and has earned three university-wide distinctions for undergraduate and graduate student teaching at Harvard, including the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize in 2007, the Roslyn Abramson Award in 2003, and a Harvard College Professorship in 2007. He was appointed as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator in 2005 and joined the JASONs, academic advisors to the U.S. government on science and technology, in 2009. Liu has published more than 70 peer-reviewed papers in chemical biology, molecular biology, and organic chemistry. His research accomplishments have earned distinctions including the American Chemical Society Pure Chemistry Award (2006), the American Chemical Society Arthur C. Cope Young Scholar Award (2004), the Glaxo-Smith-Kline Chemistry Scholar Award (2004), the AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals Excellence in Chemistry Award (2003), the Sloan Foundation Fellowship (2002), the Beckman Foundation Young Investigator Award (2002), the NSF CAREER Award (2001), the Searle Scholars Award (2000), and the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award (2000). Professor Liu's research applies evolutionary principles to the study and manipulation of biological and synthetic molecules. His major research interests include (i) the development and application of new approaches to the evolution of biological macromolecules, and (ii) the application of evolutionary principles to the discovery of synthetic small molecules, synthetic polymers, and new chemical reactions. In the first area, Professor Liu's group has developed and applied new methods for diversifying proteins and nucleic acids that enable DNA sequences to randomly recombine without any sequence homology. Other research interests in this area include the evolution in living cells of RNA molecules with biological activities from random libraries, the evolution of proteins with novel catalytic and regulatory activities, and the development of general methods to enable the continuous directed evolution of proteins and nucleic acids. These efforts have led to the laboratory evolution of macromolecular tools for studying biology, and have also dissected the structural and functional requirements of natural proteins and small RNA molecules. In addition, related efforts have recently led to the development of "supercharged proteins" as aggregation-resistant, cell-penetrating proteins with potent nucleic acid transfection abilities in vitro and in mice. In the second area of interest, Professor Liu's group has developed a new approach to the synthesis and discovery of synthetic molecules that captures fundamental advantages of biological evolution. This approach uses DNA oligonucleotides to direct the sequence-programmed synthesis of organic small molecules and polymers. As a result, the DNA template linked to each synthetic molecule can be selected for desired properties, amplified by PCR, and characterized by DNA sequencing or microarray analysis. By marrying synthetic organic chemistry with molecular biology, this research has enabled synthetic small molecules as well as synthetic polymers to undergo powerful processes of translation, selection, and amplification previously available only to biological macromolecules. Insights from these studies have also led to the development of a new approach to the discovery of chemical reactions and its successful application to discover two new transition metal-catalyzed coupling reactions. Recent lines of research in this area have also led to the discovery of several new cellular small molecule-RNA conjugates. |
