Dai Lab
Principal Investigator: Mingji Dai
Institution: Emory University (Atlanta, GA)
Primary Subfield: Molecular & Cell Bio
Recruitment Status: ✅ Accepting PhD Students ✅ Hiring Postdocs
Research Focus
Project Summary/Abstract The goal of our research program is to innovate the strategy and methodology of organic synthesis and use these innovations to solve problems of biological and medicinal importance and ultimately impact human health. Our program focuses on the synthesis and study of both natural and unnatural molecules with potential for the treatment of cancer, neurological disorders, and drug resistant infectious diseases. We view the completion of a chemical synthesis as the beginning of a larger and deeper scholarly inquiry. It would enable us to profile the biology of the selected natural products and rationally designed small molecules, decipher their mechanism of actions, and optimize the lead compounds into biological probes and novel therapeutics. The selected terpenoid and alkaloid natural products represent both the state-of-the-art challenges for complex molecule synthesis as well as promising lead compounds for novel therapeutic development. Their structural complexity, natural scarcity, and unknown mechanism of actions have significantly hampered their biomedical development. We aim to fill this gap and move these molecules forward in the drug discovery pipeli…
Active NIH Awards
- 5R35GM128570-10: Synthesis and Study of Medicinally Important Molecules (2026)
- 5R35GM128570-09: Synthesis and Study of Medicinally Important Molecules (2025)
- 5R35GM128570-08: Synthesis and Study of Medicinally Important Molecules (2024)
- 3R35GM128570-08S1: Synthesis and Study of Medicinally Important Molecules (2024)
Explore 700+ US Biology Labs on FindBioLabs.com