Rate My Professor Chang Liu

Chang Liu is a Professor and Chancellor’s Fellow in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of California, Irvine, with joint appointments in the Departments of Chemistry and Molecular Biology & Biochemistry. He serves as Director of the Center for Synthetic Biology and Director of the Engineering + Health Institute. Liu received his B.A. in Chemistry summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard University in 2005. He earned his Ph.D. in Chemistry from The Scripps Research Institute in 2009, working in the laboratory of Peter G. Schultz on expanding bacterial genetic codes for the incorporation of post-translational modifications and evolving novel protein functions. From 2009 to 2012, he was a Miller Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, in Adam Arkin's laboratory, focusing on the predictable design of complex regulatory systems using RNA switches. Liu established his independent laboratory at UC Irvine in 2013 and has advanced to full professor.

Liu's research centers on synthetic biology, protein engineering, and molecular evolution. His laboratory engineers specialized genetic systems that continuously and rapidly mutate user-selected genes in vivo, enabling evolution at unprecedented speed, scale, and depth. These systems power protein function engineering, probe evolutionary rules and sequence-function relationships, and record transient cellular information as heritable mutations. Key publications include "Continuous evolution of user-defined genes at 1-million-times the genomic mutation rate" (Rix et al., Science, 2024), "Atomically accurate de novo design of antibodies with RF diffusion" (Bennett et al., Nature, 2024), "Scalable, continuous evolution of genes at mutation rates above genomic error thresholds" (Ravikumar et al., Cell, 2018), "An orthogonal DNA replication system in yeast" (Ravikumar et al., Nature Chemical Biology, 2014), and "Adding new chemistries to the genetic code" (Liu & Schultz, Annual Review of Biochemistry, 2010). Liu has received major awards including election to the AIMBE College of Fellows (2022), NIH Director’s Transformative Research Award (2020), Moore Inventor Fellowship (2019), Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2016), NIH Director’s New Innovator Award (2015), and Beckman Young Investigator Award (2015). He presented the Robert W. Vaughan Lectureship at Caltech (2019) and co-founded Eira Bio for antibody drug development.