Pengtao Liu is a biologist and a geneticist with a long-standing interest in stem cell, development, cancer and immunity. Pengtao graduated from Henan Normal University with a BS degree in Biology and from Institute of Genetics, Chinese Academy of Sciences with MPhil. He received a PhD from Baylor College of Medicine. Following his postdoctoral training at National Cancer Institute USA, Pentao joined the faculty of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, U.K. He relocated to the HKU in 2018. He is establishing stem cells with totipotency features from several mammalian species and characterising them using molecular and functional approaches including single cell genomics. The availability of these new stem cells opens up many exciting opportunities for fundamental researches and for biotechnology. His lab is particularly interested in differentiating the stem cells to functional cells such as immune cells in vitro and in vivo, and dissecting the molecular mechanisms.