Guangmei Liu Receives 2026 Belamarich Award
Dr. Guangmei Liu of the McCall Lab was selected as the winner of the 2026 Belamarich Award for her doctoral dissertation in Biology titled “Investigation of Neuroinflammation and Selective Neuronal Vulnerability in A Glial Phagocytosis-Deficient Drosophila Model.” The selection committee was impressed by Guangmei’s productivity, the originality of her work, and the overall impact of her research on phagocytosis. The committee also commended her independence, broad intellectual interests, and the collaborative approach she demonstrated throughout her graduate career at BU.
Guangmei’s dissertation research combined computational tool development, mechanistic studies, and transgenic model generation to uncover how defective glial phagocytosis drives age-dependent neurodegeneration in Drosophila draper mutants. She developed an innovative workflow integrating whole-mount brain staining, three-dimensional imaging, and computational analysis to quantitatively map neurodegenerative vulnerability across the brain, establishing a powerful platform for future neurodegeneration studies. By integrating single-nuclei RNA sequencing, genetic perturbations, and functional assays, she identified molecular pathways linking impaired debris clearance to chronic immune activation, lipid metabolic dysregulation, and selective neuronal vulnerability during aging.
Her work also examined neuroimmune interaction at the blood-brain barrier, showing that incomplete cargo degradation in draper-deficient glia reshapes peripheral immune dynamics in the aging brain. In addition, she systematically characterized multiple draper alleles and RNAi constructs, including a newly generated CRISPR allele, to define allele- and construct-specific differences in Draper function and demonstrate that full-length Draper is essential for efficient ovarian cell clearance but less critical for neurodegeneration. Together, her dissertation provides important insight into conserved mechanisms underlying neurodegenerative disease and highlights lipid metabolism pathways as promising therapeutic targets.
More about the Belamarich Award:
Frank A. Belamarich joined the BU Biology Department in 1963 as an assistant professor where he quickly gained international recognition for his research in the field of comparative hemostasis, the process of blood clotting. Throughout his tenure at BU he was a popular teacher of a core course in cell biology which he developed. Belamarich maintained research laboratories in Boston as well as at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole in Falmouth, MA as part of the BU Marine Program.
Congratulations, Guangmei!