Drug Discovery in Prevention and Treatment of COVID-19

Hang Hubert Yin is currently a Professor and Deputy Dean of the School of Pharmaceutical Sciences at Tsinghua University. After studying for a bachelor's degree at Peking University, he received his PhD from Yale University in 2004 under the supervision of Professor Andrew Hamilton and then spent a post-doctoral period at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine with Professor William DeGrado. Prior to joining Tsinghua, he was a tenured faculty member of the University of Colorado Boulder. His research interests lie at the interface of chemistry, biology, and engineering with particular focuses on structure-based drug design, cell signaling biochemistry, biotechnology development, and membrane protein simulations. Professor Yin is a recipient of many accolades for his research in chemical biology and drug discovery, including the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars, American Chemical Society David W. Robertson Award for Excellence in Medicinal Chemistry, CAPA Distinguished Junior Faculty Award, NSF CAREER Award, AACR Gertrude B. Elion Cancer Research Award, Sidney Kimmel Scholars Award, and HHMI Collaborative Innovation Award among others.

Tenure-Track Associate Professor, The Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry and Engineering, School of Pharmaceutical Science, Tsinghua University; Professor Yu Rao received his BA degree in 1999 from Shandong Medical University and his master degree in 2002 from Shenyang Pharmaceutical University under the supervision of Prof. Ji-Xiang Chen. He obtained the Ph.D. degree from University of Georgia by working on the synthesis of biologically important complex oligosaccharides under the supervision of Prof. Geert-Jan Boons (2007). He then carried out post-doctorial research work at Sloan-kettering Cancer Center under the supervision of Prof. Sameul J. Danishefsky (2007-2010), focusing on the synthesis of bioactive natural products. He joined School of Medicine in Tsinghua University in 2010. Prof. Rao's research interests are mainly focused on developing novel therapeutics for infectious disease and cancer treatment. Prof. Rao’s laboratory has the expertises in the fields of medicinal chemistry, synthetic chemistry and chemical biology. So far, he has published over 40 peer-reviewed papers on the leading journals such as Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., J. Am. Chem. Soc., Chemical Science, Nature, Org. Lett. and Chem. Commun., etc.