David R. Liu is the Richard Merkin Professor, Director of the Merkin Institute of Transformative Technologies in Healthcare, and Mice – Chair of the Faculty at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT; Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences & Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University; and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. His major research interests include the engineering, evolution, and in vivo delivery of genome editing agents to study and treat genetic diseases; the evolution of novel therapeutic proteins using phage – assisted continuous evolution (PACE); and the discovery of bioactive synthetic molecules using DNA – templated organic synthesis and DNA – encoded libraries.

Liu has been elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. National Academy of Medicine, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is the 2022 King Faisal Prize Laureate in Medicine. He has earned several distinctions for teaching at Harvard, has published more than 225 papers and is the inventor of more than 90 issued U.S. patents.

He received his BA from Harvard and was ranked #1 out of 1641 students. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkley.