Dr Liquan Huang graduated from Department of Biology, Yale University in 1996 and became a professor in College of Life Sciences, Zhejiang University from 2013. He is currently an Adjunct Professor of Shanghai Institute for Advanced Study of Zhejiang University (SIAS).

Dr Huang has been working on themolecular biology of taste and smell for many years. In 1996, he established and optimized single taste bud cell transcriptome analysis method and made many important findings, which were published in two Nature Neuroscience papers and one Nature Genetics paper. Thus, he is one of the first scientists who could successfully utilize this powerful single cell approach. His ongoing projects are mostly focused on the regeneration of mamalian taste budcells and olfactory sensory neurons, and the function of taste and olfactory receptors and their signaling proteins in extra-oral/-nasaltissues, including:

• The effect of taste signaltransduction interruption on the proliferation and differentiation of gustatory stem cells

• Regulation of olfactory stemcells’ proliferation and differentiation

• Interactions between taste/olfactory receptors and their ligands and its correlation with ligands’ toxicity

• Interactions between taste/olfactory receptors and pathogenic microbes

• Expression and function oftaste/olfactory receptors and their signaling proteins in the extra-oral/nasal organs and organoids