School of Biomedical Sciences cordially invites you to join the following seminar:

Speaker: Professor Fei Sun, Professor, Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Talk Title: Synthetic biology approaches to smart materials for regenerative medicine

Date: 6 February 2025 (Thursday)
Time: 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm
Venue: Lecture Theatre 1, G/F, William M.W. Mong Block, 21 Sassoon Road
Host: Professor Jiandong Huang

Biography

Fei Sun is currently the Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering at HKUST (2024-present). He has worked as an Associate Professor (2020-2024) and an Assistant Professor (2014-2020) at HKUST since 2024. Before joining HKUST, he worked as a postdoctoral scholar at the Department of Chemical Engineering, Caltech (2012-2014). He obtained Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Chicago in 2012 and B.S. in Chemistry from Peking University in 2007. He is the awardee of NSFC Excellent Young Scientists Scheme (2021) and the Hong Kong RGC Research Fellow (2023). His research interests include materials synthetic biology, protein engineering, directed evolution, optogenetics, chemical biology, and regenerative medicine.

Abstract

A central question facing the bottom-up approach for material design is how to faithfully transfer the function from the molecular level to the macroscopic materials level. Natural evolution has led to a variety of protein molecules with diverse functionality and has thus furnished us with numerous tools to tackle this fundamental challenge. Drawing on some naturally occurring motifs and the emerging synthetic biology principles, we focus on the strategies for converting protein molecules into smart materials and/or tools for various applications, ranging from optogenetics to regenerative medicine.

ALL ARE WELCOME.