Qinfang Liu, a graduate student from Dr. Yulan Xiong’s lab in our neuroscience graduate program, won the 2023 Henderson Award. This award is given annually to the student with the best dissertation in the Biomedical Science PhD program, UConn Health.
During Qinfang’s PhD thesis study, he discovered both upstream regulation of LRRK2 mRNA decay and downstream regulation of LRRK2 kinase substrates in endocytosis. LRRK2 is the most common known genetic cause of Parkinson’s disease. His work results in 3 first-author research articles in the high impact journals at the EMBO Journal, Science Signaling and one to be submitted shortly. In addition to his major projects, Qinfang also has great collaborative nature as evidenced by 3 research papers as a co-author at PNAS, Cell Reports, and EMBO Reports. Recognized by his work, he was also awarded a travel award and has been selected to give an oral presentation at a nano symposium at Society for Neuroscience (SfN) annual meeting 2019 at Chicago. Qinfang is currently pursuing his postdoc training at Yale University School of Medicine.