Dr Yuxi Cheng is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Engineering at King’s College London and the Francis Crick Institute.

Yuxi studied Pharmaceutical Sciences at Peking University, graduating top of her department cohort, and also earned a Bachelor of Economics as a minor.

She completed her MSc in Pharmaceutics at Peking University under the supervision of Prof. Qiang Zhang and Dr. Bing He, where she investigated nano-bio interactions in cancer cell migration and developed calcium-phosphate nano-vaccines for cancer immunotherapy.

In 2021, Yuxi began her PhD in Materials Research at Imperial College London as a President’s PhD Scholar, supervised by Prof. Dame Molly Stevens. Her doctoral research focused on the modular design of nanoreactors to overcome matrix effects in biomedical applications, including bioorthogonal metal nano-catalysts in cancer chemoimmuno-therapeutics and metal nano-reporters for enhanced lateral flow immunoassays. She also worked as a visiting PhD student at the Kavli Institute for NanoScience Discovery, University of Oxford.

In 2025, she joined Dr. Charlie McTernan’s group at King’s College London and the Francis Crick Institute to explore the integration of supramolecular chemistry with lipid nanoparticle delivery systems for precise nucleic acid therapeutics.

Research

• Supramolecular chemistry for biomedical applications
• Targeted nucleic acid lipid nanoparticle delivery systems
• Bioorthogonal nanocatalysis for cancer chemoimmunotherapy
• Nanodiagnostics for complex biological matrices
• Nano-bio interactions

Group

The McTernan Group