The Li Group’s long term goal is to understand and develop new technologies (e.g. batteries) that will play a major role in renewable energy, sustainability, and global climate change, all of which represent grand challenges for the 21st century. To accomplish this, our research program pursues two main thrusts: (1) to develop state-of-the-art experimental tools … Continued
Biocatalysis holds the potential to revolutionize the sustainable production of biofuels, chemicals, and medicine. However, current biocatalysis research is limited to the engineering of enzyme functions known in biochemistry or organic chemistry. By combining our expertise in synthetic biology and synthetic chemistry, we are developing new strategies to discover and evolve novel modes of biocatalysis … Continued
Living tissue exhibits exquisite morphologies and material properties that are difficult to match synthetically. For decades, applying extracellular cues to cell aggregates has yielded tremendous gains in engineering tissue, influencing cell behaviors in highly valuable but often uncontrollable ways. My lab seeks a radical departure from this methodology to build next-generation synthetic tissue. We aim … Continued
Memory encodes and stores information that can be retrieved in decision-making, something that thrives in groups of organisms (e.g., ant or bee colonies), and in all processes related to human existence. However, biological memory and how it results in cellular decisions is poorly understood. This knowledge gap is a barrier for exploiting the concept of … Continued
Leveraging advances from the semiconductor industry, it is possible to fabricate microscale and nanoscale devices capable of directed reconfiguration. These properties give so-called microrobots the potential to perform difficult tasks, such as manipulate microscale objects and swim through complex fluids. However, microrobots have seen limited use in real-world settings due to highly complicated fabrication requirements. … Continued
Most artificial membrane surfaces are designed to perform a single task, like gas exchange or chemical catalysis, and they often have a chronic problem of surface fouling by foreign contaminants. In my lab, we envision the development of multifunctional membrane surfaces that enable the simultaneous operation of molecular sensing, recognition, and catalysis. We use theory, … Continued
We will develop electrocatalytic methods to enable a Net-Zero circular plastics economy. The work will use renewable electricity to up-cycle the most polluting plastics: polyethylene and polypropylene. Realizing this vision requires insight into the fundamental phenomena which steer alkane adsorption, reaction, and desorption processes at electrode surfaces. The Packard Fellowship will enable these pioneering research … Continued
Modulating and recording cell activity with cell-level precision is vital to our understanding of brain function and the treatment of brain disorders, but is very challenging in intact brains. As a Packard Fellow, I will engineer methods for precise, noninvasive, and massively multiplexed monitoring and control of cells in the brain. This fundamental research will … Continued
Perturbations in embryonic development that affect a subset of cells at one stage can start domino effects that end in complex phenotypes. Understanding these domino effects requires the ability to map mammalian development. I propose a whole-organism genetic barcoding platform for mapping detailed developmental lineage trees in mammals. In this platform, we will engineer mice … Continued
Parsing out the few key effector molecules from among the tens of thousands of molecules produced and transformed in complex multicellular tissues in the human body is the core challenge of unlocking unknown signaling pathways critical for normal function and disease. Our group approaches this problem by creating novel microscale culture systems to model multicell … Continued