Editor Profiles: Guest Editors of Special Column “Novel Peptides and Peptidomimetics in Drug Discovery”

Prof. Jianfeng Cai obtained B.S. and M.S. in chemistry from the Nanjing University in 1997 and 2000, respectively. He received his Ph.D. in bioorganic chemistry from the University of Washington in St. Louis (USA) in 2006. Before he joined USF in 2009 as an assistant professor, he did his postdoctoral research in bioorganic chemistry at Yale University in Andrew D. Hamilton group from 2007 to 2009. He was promoted to associate professor in 2015 and promoted to full professor of Chemistry at USF in 2018. He was named inaugural “USF Preeminent Professor” in 2020. His current research interest lies in the fields of bioorganic chemistry, medicinal chemistry, chemical biology and biophysics, such as designing and synthesizing novel peptidomimetics and small molecules. Specifically, he developed a new class of sequence-specific peptidomimetics-AApeptides, which could fold into well-defined protein-like secondary and tertiary structures, and display remarkable potential for the recognition of biomacromolecules and interrogate biological functions.

Dr. Lulu Wei is a research scientist in the Department of Chemistry at the University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA. Her research is focused on the expansion of interdisciplinary research at the interface of chemistry and biology to design and synthesize novel peptidomimetics and small molecules that modulate protein–protein interactions involved in critical cellular processes. Dr. Wei graduated from the Anhui Normal University in Chemistry with a Bachelor's degree in 2014. She received a Ph.D. in 2020 from the Department of Chemistry, University of South Florida, USA.