We read the chemistry of living cells without labels, one cell at a time.

Jiabao Xu is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Glasgow, where she leads a group working on single-cell Raman spectroscopy and machine learning. She read Chemistry at Imperial College London, took a DPhil (PhD) in Engineering Science at Oxford, and spent 2019 as a visiting scholar in Chemistry and Engineering at Boston University before returning to Oxford as a postdoctoral research scientist. She moved to Glasgow in 2023.

Her work asks what a single living cell is doing chemically, without staining it or killing it, and what becomes possible once that can be read at scale: identifying pathogens and their resistance without culture, telling immune cells apart by their metabolism, and sorting engineered microbes by what they actually produce. She holds a Fellowship of Recognising Excellence in Teaching from the University of Glasgow, and is a Visiting Professor at Shanghai East Hospital, Tongji University.