Project lead. Protein engineering capability lead. Strategic scoping.

Lead a protein engineering capability team to design and engineer target proteins for desirable therapeutic properties via high-throughput protein engineering and iterative directed evolution campaigns.

• Established and refined a proprietary prototype workflow for the discovery of novel natural product biosynthetic pathways and their subsequent engineering into heterologous hosts. • Led a cross-disciplinary team of over 10 people to operationalize this workflow into a high-throughput discovery pipeline.• Led three project teams of scientists and research associates to utilize the discovery pipeline to reconstitute more than 100 novel biosynthetic pathways. Demonstrated production of multiple novel metabolites with biological activity, which resulted in follow-up discovery projects.• Reconstituted and optimized heterologous biosynthetic pathway in several challenging filamentous bacterial hosts, as well as engineering endogenous pathway in a variety of natural producer strains.• Performed bioinformatic analysis on metagenomic libraries for secondary metabolites and enzyme discovery. • Collaborated with analytical chemists, fermentation scientists, data scientists, software engineers and automation engineers for pipeline improvement.

This startup company Radiant Genomics that I worked at has been acquired by Zymergen at the beginning of 2018. My primary contributions included:Discovery of novel natural product (mostly secondary metabolites) clusters and enzyme analogs;Strain engineering for heterologous production of natural products.As a chemical biologist in a small startup company, in addition to the above bioinformatic analysis and synthetic biology-related work, my job also involves method development for host strain engineering using CRISPR, HTP fermentation, molecule extraction and characterization.

• Elucidated and engineered microbial secondary metabolic pathways by combining techniques from bioinformatics, biochemistry, molecular biology, assay development and bioengineering.• Utilized various in vitro and in vivo assays and mass spectrometry to elucidate the biosynthetic mechanism of enzymes of interest, or the mode of action of bioactive natural products.• Developed a published method to genetically engineer E. coli for high-level heterologous production of combinatorial peptide/protein libraries.• Discovered and characterized a novel enzyme that generates D-alanine with high substrate tolerance through genome mining. • Developed a coupled-enzyme assay for simple identification of a class of D-amino acid post-translational modifications in peptides and proteins.• Utilized mass spectrometry to perform an in-depth mechanistic analysis of the post-translational cyclization process of ribosomal peptide natural product.

• Collaborated with the Tavassoli group to utilize a reverse two-hybrid system for the genetic selection of cyclic peptides inhibitors against protein-protein interaction.

• Provided strategic consulting service for terminal expansion plan of a foreign transportation company.

Thesis advisor: Luhua Lai

Member of the Peking University Team for 2008 International Genetically Engineered Machine (IGEM) Competition held by MITAdvisor: Prof. Qi Ouyang, Prof. Yiping Wang