Xingui Liu, Ph.D.

Xingui Liu joined the Department of Medicinal Chemistry at the College of Pharmacy, University of Florida as an Assistant Professor in 2023. Her research interest focuses on proximity agents-based early drug discovery, including hit identification, lead optimization, and assay development. Before starting her independent research career, Dr. Liu was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow in Prof. Alessio Ciulli’s lab at the Center for Targeted Protein Degradation (CeTPD), University of Dundee where she developed PROTAC degraders of Leucine Rich Repeat Kinase 2 (LRRK2), a promising target for Parkinson’s disease. Prior to this, Xingui was a Postdoc associate at the University of Florida working with Prof. Guangrong Zheng and Prof. Daohong Zhou. She earned her PhD degree in Guangrong Zheng’s lab at the University of Arkansans for Medical Sciences, where she designed, synthesized, and characterized delta-tocotrienol based radio-protectors.

Research in her laboratory is at the interface of chemistry and biology, focusing on discovering and developing small molecules that target E3 ligases, promote protein protein interactions, or induce protein degradation.

• Medicinal chemistry
• Small molecule drug discovery
• Targeted protein degradation

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