Welcome to the Niu Group in the Department of Chemistry at Boston College. Taking inspirations from Nature, we build small and large molecules via synthetic organic chemistry, directed evolution, and synthetic biology, to improve our understanding of complex biological systems and identify new therapeutic opportunities.
What we do
Organic Chemistry
We will apply the state of the art synthetic organic chemistry techniques and chemoenzymatic synthetic strategies to building blocks for fabricating functional polymeric materials. We will use contemporary polymer synthesis techniques to generate functional polymers with previously inaccessible structural features.
Biotechnology
We will deploy the synthetic small molecules and polymers we made to investigate and manipulate the functions of both prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells. Especially, we are interested in understanding and engineering cell surface in a variety of functional processes, such as cell adhesion, stem cell differentiation, cancer development, and immune response.
Synthetic Biology
Synthetic biology has emerged as a powerful approach to engineering the fundamental components of biology for the advancement of human health. Using molecular evolution principles, we are developing platform strategies for synthetic biology tools to regulate gene expression and molecular recognition in cells.
Join Us
Jia Niu
Members of the laboratory will receive training on a broad range of skills in synthetic organic chemistry, polymer synthesis and characterization, nucleic acid chemistry, bioconjugation chemistry, molecular biology, and cell biology.
Financial support
We are grateful to the generous financial support from the following:
