Doctor of philosophy - PharmACOLOGY & Pharmaceutical Science
Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences
Melbourne, Victoria
11.2017
Master of Sciences - Medicinal Chemistry
Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Sciences
07.2012
Bachelor of Sciences - Applied Chemistry
School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Shandong University
07.2009
Research Skills
LC-MS-based metabolomics and lipidomics (including lipid A profiling)
Structural characterisation of small molecules using NMR, LC/GC-MS/MS, and MALDI-TOF MS
Neutron reflectometry
Bioinformatics
Biography
I am a 4-year early career researcher and a group leader focused on the mechanisms of antimicrobial resistance at Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute (Monash University, Australia). I completed my PhD within three years at Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Science in 2018 and a master’s degree from Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2012 (Shanghai, China). I also obtained 2-year experience in pharmaceutical industry during 2012-2014. As a recognised emerging leader, I currently lead the antimicrobial metabolomics/lipidomics research program to characterise the molecular mechanisms of resistance to lipopeptides in Gram-negative bacteria. During this process I have supervised 7 students including 4 PhD, and secured numerous grants and awards, including a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) from Australian Research Council (2023-2025), an NHMRC Ideas Grant (2024–2026), a Rod Rickards Fellowship from the Australian Academy of Science (2019), an Early Career Research Grant from the Australian Institute of Nuclear Science and Engineering (2019-2021), and an FMNHS Bridging Postdoctoral Fellowship (2018-2019), as well as 8 travel awards. Over the past four years I have established extensive collaborations with >15 international researchers and have been invited to give seminars in my collaborative institutions (e.g., ETH Zurich, Switzerland; the University of Glasgow, UK; and Newcastle University, UK). Recently, I was appointed as Vice Chair for the 2023 Gordon Research Seminar in Metabolomics (Italy). Moreover, I have published over 50 research articles (14 as the first author and 2 as the corresponding author) in high-impact journals (e.g., Nat Commun, Nat Microbiol and Adv Sci), and reviewed >30 papers for over 10 journals. The achievements outlined above have strengthened my determination to go further in academia and clearly indicate my potential to become a research leader in the field of antimicrobial systems pharmacology. Importantly, my research is a key part of a large antimicrobial drug discovery program funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH, US), with a novel antibiotic QPX9003 under Phase-I clinical trials in the USA. My research targets an urgent global unmet medical need due to antimicrobial resistance.
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