Associate Professor Liangliang Sun has been awarded a prestigious US$2.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Known as the Maximising Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA), this five-year grant will support his innovative “top-down” study of proteins using advanced mass spectrometry techniques.

Sun’s research investigates human cancer cells and zebrafish embryos to explore key proteoforms in cancer and early-stage development. Zebrafish serve as an ideal model due to their genetic similarities to humans. 

Beyond groundbreaking science, Sun is committed to promoting diversity in research. The MIRA grant supports training graduate students from diverse backgrounds and organising national symposia to promote early career and female researchers in his field.

“We’ll use these novel CE-MS techniques to study the proteoforms that modulate embryonic development during the first day of an embryo’s life,” he says.

Liangliang Sun

Associate Professor