Scientific Team
Xiaowen Liu, Ph.D, Senior Scientist, received her Ph.D from SUNY-Binghamton, and was trained as a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University. She joined Osel in 2001, and has been working on developing and optimizing Osel's MucoCept technology. She has contributed significantly to overcome technical issues associated with cloning and aberrant processing of anti-viral proteins in Lactobacillus jensenii and other relevant Lactobacillus species.
Laurel A. Lagenaur, Ph.D is a Senior Scientist at Osel, and was the Primary Investigator for SBIR Phase I grant in support of the development of the MucoCept HIV approach. Dr. Lagenaur is a molecular biologist, with experience in virology and bacteriology. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University from the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, on the molecular pathogenesis of murine cytomegalovirus. Dr. Lagenaur completed a three-year postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Stomatology at the University of California, San Francisco where she studied the pathogenesis of Epstein Barr Virus in HIV disease. In addition, prior to her graduate studies, Dr. Lagenaur has seven years experience as a clinical microbiologist in both human and veterinary fields.
Yang Liu, Ph.D has been serving as the Microbiology Group Leader since September 2005. Dr. Liu leads the Microbiology Core in support of NIH funded IPCP program and Vaginal Lactobacillus Genome Sequencing and Analysis Program. Before joining Osel, Dr. Liu was a postdoctoral researcher studying genetics and functional genomics of a human pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis at Stanford University Medical School. Dr. Liu received his Ph.D. in Genetics from the University of Missouri, Columbia.
Rosa R. Yu, Ph.D, Senior Scientist, joined Osel in 2005 and her work primarily focuses on understanding the biology of vaginal microflora and the development of a non-human primate model that is suitable for evaluation of the colonization of our Lactobacillus-based topical microbicide candidates. Dr Yu received her Ph.D. in Microbiology and Immunology from the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor, on the regulation of virulence gene expression in the human pathogen Vibrio cholerae. She was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Biochemistry at Stanford University School of Medicine, where she investigated the mechanism of adventurous-motility in Myxococcus xanthus.