Haotian Sun

PhD Student

“I am grateful to spend one of the most important times in my scientific life — my PhD studies — here at UB CBE. It's a place with supportive faculty, diversified students, a professional atmosphere, and innovative research ideas.”

- Haotian

I was destined to attend UB — it brings me unlimited opportunity and a rich campus cultural life as the largest public university in the northeastern United States. Also, UB has one of the largest percentages of international students nationwide, and a variety of university-wide programs to enhance diversity. I enjoy communicating with students from all over the world and celebrating this diversity together. The large and attractive campuses lies in the peaceful and affordable city of Buffalo, making me feel comfortable to live and study here. More importantly, the faculty of CBE are so knowledgeable and warm-hearted that they bring home to me the proper attitude and methods to do research.

I've been fortunate to be able to join Dr. Chong Cheng’s group to study the development of biocompatible and biodegradable brush polymer-drug conjugates (BPDCs). I've always been interested in the realm of polymeric nanoparticles for biomedical delivery. My research work will include organic synthesis of zwitterion and monomers, ring-opening polymerization (ROP), thiol-ene click functionalization, etc. Then I'll design experiments to study drug release and degradation behaviors of the BPDCs obtained, and to understand the relationship between structures and in vitro anticancer efficacy. In vivo study is also desired to demonstrate a novel diagnostic and therapeutic approach in cancer therapy. We believe that the introduction of zwitterion to drug delivery system will render several advantages.