Dr. David Liu is a preeminent molecular biologist and biochemist who currently serves as the Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences at Harvard University and the Richard Merkin Professor at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. Born in 1973 to a Taiwanese American family, he graduated first in his class from Harvard College in 1994, where he studied chemistry and biology, earning a degree in chemistry, conducting research under Nobel laureate Elias James Corey. Following his doctoral work at the University of California, Berkeley where he initiated the first general effort to expand the genetic code in living cells, Liu earned his Ph.D. in 1999. He joined Harvard University as an assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology at just 26 years of age, making him one of the youngest faculty members in the institution's history and establishing himself as a rising star in chemical biology.
Dr. Liu is universally recognized as the pioneer of multiple revolutionary genetic engineering techniques, most notably base editing and prime editing, which enable precise single-letter modifications to DNA without creating double-strand breaks. His development of base editors in 2016 represented a paradigm shift in gene editing technology, providing a more accurate and efficient alternative to CRISPR-Cas9 that can correct the vast majority of disease-causing point mutations responsible for genetic disorders. Liu's laboratory also pioneered phage-assisted continuous evolution (PACE) and DNA-templated organic synthesis, powerful technologies that accelerate protein evolution and drug discovery. These innovations have already demonstrated profound clinical impact, with base editing successfully used to treat patients with previously incurable genetic diseases, including a case of aggressive leukemia in a 13-year-old girl that achieved complete remission.
As a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and director of the Merkin Institute of Transformative Technologies in Healthcare, Liu has been instrumental in translating basic research into clinical applications that address previously untreatable conditions. He has trained over 170 researchers throughout his career, including 73 Ph.D. students and 47 postdoctoral fellows, many of whom now hold faculty positions at leading institutions including Stanford, MIT, Yale, and UCSF. Liu has founded or co-founded several biotechnology companies including Prime Medicine, Beam Therapeutics, and Editas Medicine to advance his gene editing technologies into therapeutic applications. With over 200 publications and more than 75 issued U.S. patents to his name, Liu continues to push the boundaries of precision genetic medicine, with his work holding promise for curing thousands of genetic disorders previously considered untreatable.
