Advent calendar - December 6th - Xingang Liu

In the Zernike Institute Advent Calendar, we are presenting 24 short spotlights in December. In these specials, we highlight PhD students, postdocs, support staff and technicians of our research groups and team - providing a glimpse into their typical day at work. In Episode 6 meet Xingang Liu, PhD researcher in the Solid-State NMR group of Prof. Patrick van der Wel.

Every morning I bike about twenty minutes through the waking city and a beautiful bit of forest to get to Zernike, which is always a great start to the day. I’m from the Solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance(ssNMR) group, supervised by Prof. Patrick van der Wel. My research mainly focuses on the degradation of hyaluronic acid (HA) and the exploration of different HA conjugates. Hyaluronic acid is a molecule that keeps our eyes clear, our joints smooth, and our skin hydrated. Using high-resolution NMR, I study how HA is cleaved at the molecular level and how chemical modifications change or preserve its natural turnover. This helps us understand how HA-based materials behave in biological environments and supports the design of next-generation drug delivery systems, tissue-repair hydrogels, and anti-tumor formulations.

In short, I’m trying to map how HA lives, breaks, and transforms — and how we can use that knowledge to develop better therapies.

My work isn’t the same every day — wet lab experiments, literature reading, writing, and data analysis naturally rotate — and that variety keeps things fresh. I also enjoy the freedom to arrange my tasks based on how I feel that day, so I rarely get stuck doing the same repetitive thing for too long.

I genuinely like being busy in the lab because I enjoy hands-on work; it gives me the feeling that I’m actively moving things forward. To be honest, I often avoid reading papers and writing — they don’t give the same instant feedback as experiments do, and they can feel a bit dull. But well… it’s also a part of the work, isn’t it?

Every time I carefully load a sample into an NMR tube and start the measurement, I feel a little rush of excitement. I always can’t wait to open the data afterward and see if there’s something new to discover. NMR is such a powerful tool : it opens a window into the microscopic world and constantly gives us new molecular-level insights into materials and reaction processes that we thought we already understood.

See all Advent Calendar items 2025 here!