Professor Xu Tan obtained his bachelor’s and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Science and Technology of China and the University of Washington in Seattle, respectively. During graduate school, he worked with Dr. Ning Zheng and identified the first molecular glue degrader. He conducted postdoctoral research on genetics and virology with Dr. Stephen Elledge at Harvard Medical School. From 2014 to 2023, he ran his own laboratory at Tsinghua University before joining the CIMR in 2023. His lab conducts studies on virus-host interactions and antiviral drug discovery using high-throughput screening technologies for SARS-CoV2, HIV, hepatitis B, and Zika viruses.

Professor Tan has first-author and corresponding-author publications in high-impact journals such as Nature, Nature Genetics, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Microbiology, Cell Host & Microbe, Cell Research, Nature Communications, and PNAS, which have been cited over 6000 times. He has led an international cooperation project and two sub-projects of the Ministry of Science and Technology’s Key Research and Development Program. He has also won grants of the National Natural Science Foundation’s Excellent Young Scientist and General Programs. For his scientific accomplishments, Dr. Tan was awarded the Bayer Investigator Award, the Damon Runyon Postdoctoral Fellowship, the  GE and Science Magazine Young Life Scientist Award etc. His lab has generated several national and international patents.