David Liu

Professor Of The Natural Sciences
Harvard

David Liu is the Richard Merkin Professor and director of Merkin Institute of Transformative Technologies in Healthcare, vice-chair of faculty at Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of Natural Sciences at Harvard University, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. Liu’s major research interests include the engineering, evolution, and in vivo delivery of genome editing proteins such as base editors to study and treat genetic diseases; evolution of proteins with novel therapeutic potential using phage-assisted continuous evolution (PACE); and discovery of bioactive synthetic small molecules and synthetic polymers using DNA-templated organic synthesis and DNA-encoded libraries. Base editing—the first general method to perform precision gene editing without double-stranded breaks, and a Science 2017 Breakthrough of the Year finalist—as well as prime editing, PACE, and DNA-templated synthesis are four examples of technologies pioneered in his laboratory. Liu has been elected to the US National Academy of Sciences, the US National Academy of Medicine, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His research accomplishments have earned distinctions including the Ronald Breslow Award for Biomimetic Chemistry, the American Chemical Society David Perlman Award, ACS Chemical Biology Award, the American Chemical Society Pure Chemistry Award, the Arthur Cope Young Scholar Award, the NIH Marshall Nirenberg Lecturer, and awards from the Sloan Foundation, Beckman Foundation, NSF CAREER Program, and Searle Scholars Program. He was named a Top 20 Translational Researchers in the world by Nature Biotechnology, and was named one of Nature’s 10 researchers in world and to the Foreign Policy Leading Global Thinkers in 2017.