Rate My Professor Mingxu Xu

Mingxu You is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He joined the faculty as an Assistant Professor in September 2016 and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in June 2022. You earned a B.S. in Chemistry from Peking University in 2008 and a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Florida in 2012, where he worked under Prof. Weihong Tan on DNA-based devices for cancer diagnosis, targeted drug delivery, and cell membrane biophysical studies. From 2014 to 2016, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Weill Cornell Medical College with Prof. Samie R. Jaffrey, developing RNA-based fluorescent sensors for imaging metabolites and signaling molecules in live cells. He holds affiliations with the Graduate Program in Molecular and Cellular Biology, Center for Bioactive Delivery, Models to Medicine in the Institute for Applied Life Sciences, and the Materials Science and Engineering Interdisciplinary Graduate Program.

You's research centers on nucleic acid chemistry and engineering, leveraging DNA and RNA nanotechnology for bioimaging, biosensing, synthetic biology, and membrane biophysics. His lab develops genetically encoded fluorescent RNA sensors for cellular imaging of metabolites, images force transduction at cell-cell junctions at the single-molecule level, evolves functional aptamers in living cells via high-throughput methods, and explores conditional self-assembly of nucleic acid nanostructures. He has co-authored over 90 journal articles and 5 book chapters in leading venues such as Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Chemistry, Nature Chemical Biology, PNAS, JACS, Angewandte Chemie, Nucleic Acids Research, Nano Letters, and ACS Nano, garnering more than 7,000 citations. Key publications include "DNA probes for monitoring dynamic and transient molecular encounters on live cell membranes" (Nature Nanotechnology, 2017), "Multiplexed sequential imaging in living cells with orthogonal fluorogenic RNA aptamer/dye pairs" (Nucleic Acids Research, 2024), and "Force-responsive delivery of anticancer drugs via a DNA mechanical nanovehicle" (Nano Letters, 2025). You has delivered approximately 40 invited seminars at top universities and institutes. His achievements are honored with awards including the NSF CAREER Award (2019), Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2019), Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award (2021), College of Natural Sciences Outstanding Research Award (2024), NIH Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA; 2019, renewed 2025), and Fellow of the International Association of Advanced Materials (2025).