Rate My Professor Qing Lin

Qing Lin is the UB Distinguished Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University at Buffalo. He received his BS degree from the University of Science and Technology of China in 1994, MS degree from the University of Pittsburgh in 1997, and PhD from Yale University in 2000. From 2000 to 2003, he was a Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Lin joined the University at Buffalo in 2005, where he has established a prominent research program in bioorganic and medicinal chemistry.

Lin's research specializes in bioorthogonal chemistry, including the discovery and development of organic reactions for applications in living systems, peptide and protein therapeutics, and synthetic biology. He pioneered photoclick chemistry in 2008, introducing a light-triggered bioorthogonal reaction for selective labeling of membrane proteins such as G protein-coupled receptors in living cells. His laboratory has developed advanced bioorthogonal tools, including superfast tetrazole-BCN cycloaddition, hydrazonyl sultones for nitrile imine ligation, and latent electrophilic amino acids for site-specific protein crosslinking via genetic code expansion. These innovations have enabled studies of protein dynamics and the design of novel therapeutics, including proteolytically stable biaryl-crosslinked GIPR/GLP-1R peptide dual agonists and cell-penetrating domain antibodies. Lin co-founded Transira Therapeutics in 2018 to develop oral peptide hormone therapies for Type 2 diabetes and CovalaBio Inc. in 2023 for electrophilic antibody-based cancer treatments. He has authored 86 peer-reviewed publications with over 8,500 citations, holds eight patents, and has an h-index of 38. Notable publications include “Light-Triggered Click Chemistry” (Chemical Reviews, 2021, 121, 6991–7031), “Superfast tetrazole-BCN cycloaddition reaction for bioorthogonal protein labeling on live cells” (Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2022, 144, 57–62), “Hydrazonyl Sultones as Stable Tautomers of Highly Reactive Nitrile Imines for Fast Bioorthogonal Ligation Reaction” (Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2023, 145, 9959–9964, highlighted in C&EN), and “Design of Cell-Penetrating Domain Antibodies via a Genetically Encoded β-Lactam Amino Acid” (Angewandte Chemie International Edition, 2025). His contributions have earned him election as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2025, the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities in 2020, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Fellowship in 2013, and the National Academies Keck Future Initiatives in Synthetic Biology Grant Award in 2010.