Early Career Researcher Grant awarded to Dr. Wenyi Li

Dr. Wenyi Li was recently awarded Early Career Researcher Grant. This is a highly competitive and prestigious scheme that supports early career researchers with high research potential to progress their careers by funding high quality research projects and pilot research projects.

High throughput screening of antimicrobial peptides to combat pathogenic bacteria

Due to the increasing multi-drug resistant bacterial infections in medical health areas, there is a need to develop a novel and effective family of antibiotics. Currently, antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) have been considered as a new class of therapeutics to target pathogens.

With the support of Sir Weary Dunlop grant and ECR Grant support from the Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences, Dr Li will develop novel AMP analogues via a new library chemical synthesis strategy, which will enhance their activity to target clinical pathogens, reduce cytotoxicity and investigate the optimised AMPs’ mode of actions. This will be an unquestionably great opportunity for me to stabilise my academic career as an early career researcher and, in turn, enable me to build up my academic skills set for my future endeavours and, in particular, obtain preliminary data for a national competitive grant application.