Chenglong Li, Ph.D.

Chenglong Li, Ph.D., obtained his B.Sc. in chemistry and M.Sc. in physical chemistry from Beijing University in 1985 and 1988, respectively. Following college, he worked at the Institute of Biophysics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He came to the United States and obtained his Ph.D. in biophysics at Cornell University, New York in 2000. He spent five years in San Diego, California, working as a postdoc in structural biology at the Burnham Institute for Medical Research (2000-2002) and as a research associate in computational chemistry at the Scripps Research Institute (TSRI, 2002-2005). Starting August 1, 2005, he moved to Columbus, Ohio as a tenure-track assistant professor in the Division of Medicinal Chemistry and Pharmacognosy at the College of Pharmacy, the Ohio State University, and rose through the ranks to associate professor with tenure in 2011 and full professor in 2016. In August 2016, he was appointed as the Nicholas Bodor Professor in Drug Discovery and professor of medicinal chemistry at the University of Florida.

Li’s scholarly interests range from organic chemistry, biochemistry, medicinal chemistry to physical chemistry, computational chemistry, molecular biophysics and pharmacology. His research focuses on molecular recognition, with a strong application to structure-based computer-aided drug design. He combines molecular simulation, synthetic chemistry, X-ray protein crystallography, thermodynamic measurements, cellular techniques and in vivo animal models to explore molecular interactions, especially protein-ligand interactions, at molecular, cellular and organismal levels. His current working projects include both computational method development and drug design applications, for example: 1) pioneering development of a novel Multiple Ligand Simultaneous Docking (MLSD) strategy, with great potential for Fragment-Based Drug Design (FBDD); 2) design and discovery of drugs targeting the IL-6/STAT3 inflammatory and oncogenic pathway for targeted therapy; 3) design and discovery of drugs targeting epigenetic histone arginine methylation enzymes, especially PRMT5; 4) design and discovery of drugs targeting specific nAChR and ASIC1 subtypes for drug addiction and neurodegenerative diseases; 5) design and discovery of “chemical chaperone” drugs targeting F508 NBD1 misfolding intermediates for potential cystic fibrosis therapy.

• h-index: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=cpPZNU0AAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao • First-in-Class PRMT5-targeting epigenetic drug commercialization development licensing agreement • NIH DDNS (Drug Discovery for the Nervous System) study section regular membership

0000-0001-9460-3168