March 28, 2024

Two Mizzou Engineers earned honors at an international exhibition in New Orleans in March.

The awards were given at the 2024 International Association for Dental Research (IADR) General Session and Exhibition, which was held in conjunction with the Annual Meeting of the American Association for Dental, Oral, and Craniofacial Research (AADOCR).

IADR is a professional association and the global leader in dental, oral and craniofacial research with more than 10,000 members around the world. AADOCR is the premier research organization for advancing oral science, dental and craniofacial research in the U.S.

Both award recipients work in the lab of Xiaohua Liu, a professor of chemical and biomedical engineering.

“I’m incredibly proud of my team and the honors they received at this prestigious event,” Liu said. “It was also an incredible opportunity to meet and network with leaders in the field.”

Yingzi Li, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering, received the “Young Investigator Award” from the IADR Mineralized Tissue Group (MTG). She was recognized for her abstract around assembling nanofibrous microspheres into 3D matrices for alveolar bone regeneration.

Qian Li, a postdoc in Liu’s lab, received “Best Scientific Paper for Current MTG Members.” Li was recognized for a paper on delivering multifunctional peptide-conjugated gene carrier complexes from monodisperse microspheres for bone regeneration.

The awards come on the heels of Liu’s recent election to the College of Fellows of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.