Liam Landon comes to Memphis from the West Coast, having been born in Los Angeles, Calif., and completing a degree in chemical biology from the University of California, Berkeley. He also worked as a High-Throughput Chemistry Research Assistant at Octant Bio and as an undergraduate researcher in the Sarpong Lab at UC Berkeley. Landon’s experience as saw him serving as a certified Emergency Medical Technician with CrowdRx and as an Instructional Laboratory Assistant in the UC Berkeley College of Chemistry.
His early exposure to medicine came through the Osborne Head and Neck Institute in Los Angeles, including international surgical mission trips to Guatemala in 2022 and 2023. Landon remains active in STEM mentorship through the YMCA Y-Scholars program, Octant’s Biotech Partners internship, and the Osborne Head and Neck Foundation.
Landon's research centers on leveraging synthetic chemistry to develop chemical tools that accelerate drug discovery and illuminate disease mechanisms. As an undergraduate in the Sarpong Lab at UC Berkeley, he independently designed and executed a nine-step total synthesis targeting the natural product viridistratin D, applying a dienyne variant of the Hopf cyclization to close its polycyclic scaffold.
At Octant Bio, Landon develops robust protocols for multistep, one-pot syntheses at nanomole scale, enabling the parallel generation of large combinatorial libraries that are screened directly in cell-based assays. He is especially drawn to work at the interface of chemistry and biology, including the design of covalent probes, targeted protein degraders, and other small molecules that integrate cleanly with high-throughput screening. In graduate school, Landon aims to build chemical tools that probe fundamental biological questions and enable new therapeutic interventions, particularly for pediatric disease.
For Landon, St. Jude’s Department of Chemical Biology and Therapeutics offers an exceptional environment for research that unites synthetic chemistry with biological discovery, and its faculty work on covalent chemistry, automated synthesis, high-throughput bioscience, and genome-targeting molecules aligns closely with his background in parallel synthesis and protocol optimization. He was drawn to St. Jude’s rare integration of cutting-edge basic research with direct clinical impact, as well as its deeply collaborative, interdisciplinary culture. Its singular commitment to curing pediatric catastrophic diseases makes the St. Jude Graduate School’s Biomedical Sciences PhD program the ideal place for him to develop chemical tools that translate fundamental discovery into new therapies.
Hometown: Los Angeles, CA
Education:
2024 BS, Chemical Biology, University of California, Berkeley
Awards/Honors/Scholarships:
2023 T.Z. and Irmgard Chu Scholarship, UC Berkeley College of Chemistry
2023 Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF), UC Berkeley Office of Undergraduate Research & Scholarships
2023 Solarpunk Futures: Illustrating the Future of Solar (2nd Place), Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE)
2022 ATO Foundation Leadership Award, ATO Foundation of Berkeley