Tina Liu, PhD

Tina Liu is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry and a resident faculty member of the Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine. She also holds a secondary appointment in the Division of Medical Oncology within the Department of Medicine at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School (RWJMS). Her research aims to explore the diverse and complex mechanisms of microbial defense systems, and use these insights to engineer novel tools for health and medicine.

Prior to arriving at Rutgers, Dr. Liu worked as a Senior Scientist at Beam Therapeutics (Cambridge, MA), developing new technologies for genome editing. She also did her postdoctoral research in Dr. Jennifer Doudna’s lab at UC Berkeley, where she defined the nucleic acid targeting preference of Type III CRISPR-Cas complexes and led a multidisciplinary team that developed tandem CRISPR nuclease chemistries for RNA detection and point-of-care diagnostics. She completed her Ph.D. at Harvard University in Dr. Tom Rapoport’s lab, where she investigated the mechanism of membrane fusion in the endoplasmic reticulum.