2026 SAPA Science and Career Symposium

Yuhua joined ScheringPlough in 1998 after completing a Master’s degree with Prof. Paul Kiprof at the University of Minnesota and a yearlong research assistantship with Prof. Richard Silverman at Northwestern University. Since entering the pharmaceutical industry, she has contributed to both process development and discovery research across a broad range of therapeutic areas. She is a coinventor of Victrelis (boceprevir), the firstinclass HCV NS3 protease inhibitor, and Narlaprevir, a secondgeneration protease inhibitor developed by RPharm. For these contributions, Yuhua received the ScheringPlough President’s Award in 2002 and the Thomas Alva Edison Patent Award in 2006 for the discovery of boceprevir.

Driven by her research interests, Yuhua pursued and completed her Ph.D. with Prof. Xumu Zhang at Rutgers University while working fulltime at Merck. In recent years, she has focused on delivering highquality molecules to advance drug discovery programs across multiple stages and modalities. In 2022, she presented on behalf of the Merck PCSK9 team at the 27th American Peptide Symposium, highlighting the discovery of MK0616.

Currently, Yuhua is a Principal Scientist at Merck and serves as an external partners lead, responsible for aligning internal and external chemistry resources to progress programs toward key milestones. Beyond her pipeline contributions, she has spent over a decade as an Ambassador for catalysis and capability building. She is passionate about empowering teams and accelerating innovation through the development and integration of new scientific capabilities.

Dongfang Liu, Ph.D., is a tenured full Professor at the Department of Pathology, Immunology, and Laboratory Medicine in Rutgers University - New Jersey Medical School (NJMS). He also serves as the Scientific Director of the Cellular Imaging & Histology Core at Rutgers-NJMS. In 2012, Dr. Liu was recruited to Baylor College of Medicine as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Departments of Pediatrics, and Pathology & Immunology. In 2015, he joined the Houston Methodist Research Institute (HMRI, affiliated with Weill Cornell Medical College (WCMC)/Cornell University) as a tenure-track Assistant Professor. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2018 in HMRI. Dr. Liu earned his Ph.D. in immunology from 2001 to 2005 in Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), with a focus on natural killer (NK) biology and immunology, his M.D. in medicine in Wuhan University School of Medicine in 2001. After completing his Ph.D. training in HUST, he joined the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for his postdoctoral training from 2005 to 2011, specializing in the immunobiology of NK cells and immunological synapse. After completing his postdoctoral training at NIH, he joined the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard in 2011 as a Senior Research Scientist, focusing on HIV-specific immune cell dysfunction and immunological synapse. Dr. Liu's current research focuses on the immunobiology of NK cells, Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR)-NK cells, and immunological synapse biology and application. With over 20 years of experience in NK cell research and > 10 patent applications, Dr. Liu has published extensively in top-tier journals, including Nature Immunology, Immunity, Nature Communications, JACI, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). He serves on several editorial boards and acts as a reviewer for numerous journals and grant agencies, including the NIH and DOD. Dr. Liu holds multiple federal research grants to study the basic mechanisms of NK cell biology and CAR-NK.

Binfeng Lu is a tumor immunologist who leads a lab at the Hackensack Meridian Center for Discovery and Innovation (CDI) focused on T cell–based cancer immunotherapy. He is a director and member at CDI, a professor of immunology at Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine, and a member of the Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center. His lab has defined fundamental mechanisms of anti-tumor immune regulation, including the discovery of TIM3⁺ tumor Treg cells and the identification of T-bet and Eomes as key transcription factors that inhibit tumor-specific memory stem T cells. His research has pioneered our understanding of how “alarmin” cytokines such as IL‑33 and IL‑36 can be harnessed to develop next‑generation immunotherapies. As a cofounder of a clinical-stage biotech company, he has contributed to clinical programs targeting cytokines for the therapy of cancer. Trained at Tsinghua University (BS in Biology), Columbia University (Ph.D. in Molecular Immunology), and Yale (postdoctoral fellowship in T cell immunobiology), he rose through the academic ranks at the University of Pittsburgh from assistant professor to tenured professor of immunology over nearly two decades before moving his lab to CDI in 2022 to accelerate translation of his discoveries to cancer patients.

Liling Wan received her B.S. from Tsinghua University in Biological Sciences and Biotechnology, and her Ph.D. from Princeton University in Molecular Biology. During her Ph.D. she studied molecular basis of cancer metastasis with Dr. Yibin Kang. She then pursued her postdoctoral training in the laboratory of Dr. David Allis at the Rockefeller University, during which she worked on chromatin and epigenetic mechanisms in cancer. She is now leading a research group to investigate how epigenetic mechanisms regulate cell fate control and cancer. Wan lab website: https://www.lilingwanlab.com/

Dr. XingXing Zang received his M.Med from Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine and PhD from the University of Edinburgh, and completed postdoctoral training with Jim Allison at UC Berkeley and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He is currently Professor, the Louis Goldstein Swan Endowed Chair, and Founding Director of the Marilyn and Stanley M. Katz Institute for Immunotherapy for Cancer and Inflammatory Disorders at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York. Dr. Zang has made seminal contributions to immune checkpoint biology and immunotherapy. Several first-in-class dugs originating from his lab are currently in clinical trials across a wide range of human cancers. In addition, he is a scientific founder of multiple biotechnology companies. Zang lab website:  https://www.xingxingzanglab.org.

Huaye Zhang is an Associate Professor at the Department of Neuroscience and Cell Biology. She completed her PhD and postdoctoral training at the University of Virginia. She provided the following statement about her lab:

Neurons are arguably the most polarized/compartmentalized cell type in the human body. Their polarity establishment starts with axon/dendrite specification. Further compartmentalization occurs during the formation of dendritic spines, which receive most of the excitatory synaptic inputs in the brain. Moreover, not all spines are created equal. Some persist for life, while others are more plastic. This high degree of compartmentalization ensures the input specificity of synaptic transmission and is essential for cognitive functions.

However, it is unclear how neurons can maintain this high level of compartmentalization and achieve both stability and plasticity in spines that are just a few microns apart. Polarity proteins are ideally suited to function in this capacity, as their main job is to compartmentalize the cell by separating and maintaining distinct membrane domains.

A major focus of our lab is to understand the role of a group of polarity regulators called Par (partitioning defective) proteins in dendritic spine morphogenesis and plasticity.  We are also interested in how their regulation of spine plasticity translates to cognitive functions in vivo.  A second direction of the lab is to understand the role of these Par proteins in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease.

We employ a wide range of experimental approaches including molecular, biochemical, and live imaging methods such as FRET, FRAP, two-photon in vivo imaging, and optogenetic manipulations of cellular and molecular activities. We use a combination of both primary neuronal cultures and conditional knockout mouse models.