Dr. Gong Cheng is a Postdoctoral Fellow working with Dr. Juan Pérez-Mercader at Rowland Institute at Harvard, Harvard University. He earned his Ph.D. degree in Chemistry from Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Science. After graduation, he worked as a postdoctoral scholar at the Pennsylvania State University. He moved to Harvard in Dec. 2017. His research interests focus on the design of innovative materials and technology for application in biomedicine and synthetic biology. Currently, his research topic in EPS at Harvard is to explore the origin of life from the chemical and materials perspective. More specifically, construction of an artificial cell or cell-like compartment to explain the formation of protocell and decode the origin of life.