Haoran Yu wins £200k for enzyme engineering research at Zhejiang University

Haoran Yu received his PhD in 2019 from the Department of Biochemical Engineering, UCL, under the supervision of Prof. Paul Dalby, for work on protein engineering of transketolase. Since July 2018, he worked as a research associate with Dr Derek Macmillan in Department of Chemistry, UCL, to incorporate unnatural amino acids into proteins using the expanding genetic codes method. Haoran recently secured a principal investigator position in Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China, with the initial grant of £200K, for research in the area of enzymes engineering. Specifically he will focus on engineering enzymes to produce high-value products in chemical and pharmaceutical industries by the methods of machine learning or through incorporating non-natural amino acids. . Zhejiang University is consistently ranked among China's top universities and also one of the global collaborators of UCL. 

“The diversification of enzymes through the use of non-natural amino acids has significant potential for generating novel enzymes with properties that are not otherwise possible using the standard set of 20" Prof. Paul Dalby July 2020