Postdoctoral fellow Dr. Rui Liu has been named iCubed’s “Featured Researcher of the Month” for January 2013. The Institute is proud to highlight Dr. Liu as the first featured researcher of the new year for her hard work and dedication in the laboratory.

Dr. Liu’s research is focused on both the Multi-Path project and a pilot project titled “Advancement of Concatameric Epitope Vaccines by Characterization of Combinatorial Epitope Assemblies for Optimal Expression, Solubility and Immunogenicity.” The goal of Multi-Path is to develop one single epitope-driven biodefense vaccine that is effective for three Burkholderia pathogens (Burkholderia pseudomallei, Burkholderia mallei and Burkholderia cepacia). The goal of her pilot project is to establish an experimental approach that addresses the problem of finding viable epitope orders for epitope-driven vaccines. This project is based on the hypothesis that proteins comprising different epitope orders will demonstrate different expression levels and immunogenicity. Both projects are based on the iVAX toolkit.

Prior to iCubed, Dr. Liu worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the pharmacology department at Okayama University in Japan, where she also received her Ph.D. in pharmacology. There she studied the immune role of one transmembrane multiligand receptor, called RAGE, to its ligand’s axis.

In the future, Dr. Liu hopes to design and develop vaccines for cystic fibrosis patients.