Dr. Shuyu Meng

Ph.D, Unniversity of Minnesota, 2025

B.Sc., Colorado State University, 2019

Shuyu was born in Anhui, China and moved to the United States in 2017 to attend Colorado State University, where she earned her B.Sc. in Microbiology. As an undergraduate, she conducted research in the lab of Professor Glenn Telling, investigating the biochemical properties of bank vole prion protein using transgenic mouse models. In 2019, she began her PhD in Molecular Pharmacology and Therapeutics at the University of Minnesota under the mentorship of Professor Louis Mansky. Her doctoral work focused on identifying molecular determinants in the matrix domain of Human T-Cell Leukemia Virus Type 1 (HTLV-1) that are critical for viral particle assembly and release. In 2025, Shuyu joined the MacMillan group as a postdoctoral fellow. Outside the lab, she enjoys reading, building legos and puzzles.

Fun Facts

• Shuyu loved organic chemistry as an undergrad because of an inspiring professor who was actually a MacMillan group alumnus. She even did a summer project working in an ochem lab filled with pyridine, only to realize wet lab organic chemistry was way messier than molecular biology. She never touched ochem again and stuck with molbio ever since… until fate (and science) brought her full circle to the MacMillan group for her postdoc.
• Shuyu was extremely bad at English in high school and once planned to study Chinese literature in college just to avoid the language entirely but somehow ended up living in America and doing science.
• Shuyu owns a shocking amount of plushies. Most of them are plague doctors/ nurses themed.