David R. Liu

David Ruchien Liu (; born 1973) is an American molecular biologist, biochemist, and organic chemist who is the Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences at Harvard University and the Richard Merkin Professor at the Broad Institute. He is known as the pioneer of multiple genetic engineering techniques, including base editing, prime editing, and DNA-templated organic synthesis.

Born to a Taiwanese American family, Liu graduated first in his class from Harvard College, where he studied chemistry and biology under Nobel Prize laureate Elias James Corey. After earning his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, Liu became a professor at Harvard at age 26. He served as the university's John L. Loeb Professor of the Natural Sciences from 2003 to 2004 and as a Harvard College Professor from 2007 to 2010.

Liu is a principal investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the director of the Merkin Institute of Transformative Technologies in Healthcare at the Broad Institute. He has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2022, he was awarded the King Faisal Prize in Medicine for his contributions to gene editing. In 2025, he was awarded a Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for the development of base editing and prime editing, both fundamental gene-editing techniques.

Liu is also a co-founder of the Center for Therapeutic Genetics, a nonprofit collaboration between the Broad Institute, Boston Children’s Hospital, and Jackson Laboratory Rare Disease Translational Center.

Early life and education Liu was born to a Taiwanese American family in Riverside, California, on June 12, 1973. Both of his parents immigrated to the United States from Taiwan. His father is an aerospace engineer and his mother is a retired physics professor at the University of California, Riverside. He studied botany, entomology, and chemistry, often mixing household items to create improvised explosives. While in high school, he took classes at the University of California, Riverside, and placed second in the national 1990 Westinghouse Science Talent Search for "using a computer to simulate how the brain processes visual information." He had originally intended to study physics but, after studying under chemistry professors Stuart Schreiber, Gregory Verdine, and Joseph Grabowski, focused on synthetic chemistry and biochemistry instead. Grabowski later recommended Liu to Nobel laureate Elias James Corey for a research position in Corey's laboratory to study oxidosqualene cyclases. He was awarded Harvard's 1994 Thomas T. Hoopes Prize for an outstanding senior thesis titled, "Studies on 2,3-Oxidosqualene Cyclase: A Synthetic and Molecular Biological Approach," and “equivalent to a Ph.D. thesis.” His doctoral dissertation was titled, "Expanding the scope of protein mutagenesis."

Academic career While still in his fourth year of doctoral studies at Berkeley, Liu was invited by Corey to deliver a seminar at Harvard. According to Nature, "members of the chemistry faculty there were so impressed that they offered him a job as soon as he got his PhD". Liu was appointed an assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard at only age 26. He was promoted to an associate professor in 2003 and to a full professor in 2005. Liu also became a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator in 2005 and joined the JASONs, an elite group of academic science advisors to the U.S. government, in 2009. He was honored as a Harvard College Professor in 2007, in part for his undergraduate teaching. His introductory life sciences course, beginning in 2005, became Harvard's largest natural sciences course.

In 2017 and 2019, he was named to the Nature’s 10 researchers in world and to the Foreign Policy Leading Global Thinkers. In April 2019, Liu delivered a TED talk on base editing in Vancouver at TED2019, resulting in a standing ovation from the live audience. In 2019, prime editing was named as one of Nature's 10 remarkable papers from 2019 and one of The Scientist's top technical advances. In 2020, Liu earned the American Chemical Society David Perlman Award and the American Chemical Society ACS Chemical Biology Lectureship Award, was elected to the National Academy of Science (NAS), the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) and was named as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Liu was also awarded the 2025 Foundation for the National Institutes of Health Montrone-Seigel Prize in Biomedical Sciences (successor of the Lurie Prize), and the 2026 American Chemical Society Award for Creative Invention.

Awards

2006 – ACS Award in Pure Chemistry 2020 – National Academy of Medicine 2020 – American Association for the Advancement of Science 2021 – National Academy of Sciences 2022 – King Faisal Prize 2024 – Gabbay Award 2025 – Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences 2025 – Foundation for the National Institutes of Health Montrone-Seigel Prize in Biomedical Sciences 2025 – Harvey Prize 2026 – Franklin Institute Bower Award for Achievement in Science

Research Liu's research group pioneered base editing, a new method of genome editing that enables the direct and precise conversion of a single base to another base in the genome of living cells, without making DNA double-stranded breaks (DSBs) that lead to complex mixtures of insertions, deletions, and DNA rearrangements. Liu's research group also pioneered prime editing, a versatile genome editing method that can install all possible base-to-base conversions, insertions, deletions, and combinations in mammalian cells without requiring double-strand DNA breaks or donor DNA templates. In 2025, Liu's team, in collaboration with the Sternberg Lab, reported a laboratory-evolved CRISPR-associated transposase for gene integration in human cells with high efficiency. This work complements other transposon-based methods from the Abudayyeh-Gootenberg Lab and Metagenomi.

Liu's lab has also worked on DNA-Templated Synthesis (DTS), generating some of the first examples of DNA-encoded libraries (DELs), now commonly used in drug discovery efforts in academia and in pharmaceutical companies. His lab also developed phage-assisted continuous evolution (PACE), a technique that uses the short 10-minute lifespan of M13 bacteriophage to achieve the rapid evolution of useful proteins. The lab has used PACE and its directed evolution efforts to generate new genome editing tools that allow for expanded DNA accessibility and DNA base conversions. He has published over 275 peer-reviewed publications and his H-index is ≥170 according to Google Scholar.

Commercial activity Liu co-founded Editas Medicine (genome editing with CRISPR nucleases for human therapeutics), Pairwise Plants (genome editing for agriculture), Beam Therapeutics (base editing for human therapeutics), Exo Therapeutics (novel small-molecule drug discovery), Resonance Medicine (novel enzymatic solutions for unmet challenges in medicine), and nChroma Bio (novel gene editing delivery technologies and genomic medicines that harness epigenetics). He is the scientific founder of Prime Medicine (prime editing for human therapeutics).

Liu also founded Permeon Biologics and Ensemble Therapeutics. Permeon Biologics was founded in 2011 by Liu and Flagship Ventures to develop a class of proteins to enable the transport of large molecules such as antibodies into cells to facilitate development of "intrabody" therapeutics and ceased its operations in 2015. Ensemble Therapeutics was founded in 2004 with funding from Flagship Ventures to develop Liu's work on macrocycles; the company raised about $40M and struck several pharmaceutical partnerships, but was shut down in 2017 before any of its lead compounds had reached the market.

Personal life Liu was the lead tester of Naughty Dog's 1994 video game Way of the Warrior, for which he also provided the voice of the character Chin "The Dragon" Liu. He was known to be a prolific professional Street Fighter II player, with Naughty Dog co-founder Andy Gavin saying that "He was one of those savant guys at Street Fighter who's just insanely good". He met his wife, Julie Liu, while attending the University of California, Berkeley.

Selected papers