Dr Meilan Huang

Dr. Meilan Huang joined Queen’s University Belfast in 2007 as a lecturer. She worked with Prof Fengling Qing in the Key Laboratory of Organofluorine Chemistry at Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1998-1999. After being awarded a Ph.D. degree in Computational Chemistry at Zhejiang University in Feb 2003, she was a postdoc working with Prof Arvi Rauk in the Department of Chemistry at University of Calgary Canada.

She was a Welcome Trust research fellow in the Laboratory of Physical and Theoretical Chemistry at University of Oxford working with Prof W. Graham Richards, FRS in 2004-2006 and a research fellow working with Prof Artem Cherkasov in Department of Medicine, University of British Columbia, Canada in 2006-2007. She is a Fellow of Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC) and a Fellow of Royal Society of Biology (FRSB).

Her main research area is developing and applying Computational methods for biocatalysis. She studies the interactions and catalytic mechanism of various enzymes to direct the rational design of novel biocatalysts for chemical transformations. She published over 60 full research articles in high-impact peer-reviewed journals. 

She has led the Computational team in several interdisciplinary research projects. She was the Co-PI of the interdisciplinary biotechnological project “Development of a computational and molecular biology platform between QUB and Almac” (2015-2019). She is the Co-PI in a new 3-year project (2021-2024) INSIGHT@ "IN Silico-Informed metaGenomic Harvesting Technology", in close collaboration with experimentalists and industry. So far, she has secured over £2m research income with a share of £621k.