XDL
Xiang David Li
The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong - Winner: Tetrahedron Young Investigator Award For Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry
Xiang David Li obtained his B.Sc. in chemistry from Fudan University in 2003, and Ph.D. in organic and bioorganic chemistry in 2008 from The University of Hong Kong under the supervision of Professor Dan Yang. He then moved to New York to conduct his postdoctoral training in chemistry and cell biology with Prof. Tarun M. Kapoor at Rockefeller University. In 2011, he returned to The University of Hong Kong to start his independent career as an assistant professor and was promoted to full professor in 2020. His research, at the interface of chemistry and biology, aims at deciphering the landscape of histone PTMs using chemical approaches. His most important contribution to the field of epigenetics is the development of a variety of new and robust chemical tools and methodology for comprehensive identification of proteins that are responsible for ‘writing’, ‘erasing’, or ‘translating’ histone PTMs, which helped to unravel biological roles played by specific histone modification and to clarify how the histone PTMs are interpreted in normal physiology and disease pathogenesis.