Date/Time: 10:00 a.m. Thursday, May 7th
Venue: The Frontier Technology Research Institute of Tianjin University
Lecturer: David Yu Zhang
About Lecturer:
David Yu Zhang leads the Nucleic Acid Bioengineering Laboratory (NABLab) at Rice University's BioScience Research Collaborative. His investigations involve the systematic modeling and rational design of nucleic acids, such as DNA and RNA. Zhang is particularly interested in understanding how natural nucleic acids behave, and in the engineering of designer nucleic acid molecules that enable revolutionary in vitro diagnostics, in situ imaging, tissue engineering, transcription regulation, and materials scaffolding and modulation.
Prior to joining the Rice bioengineering program in 2013, Zhang worked as a postdoctoral scholar in the laboratory of Assistant Professor Peng Yin at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and Harvard Medical School. While at Harvard, Zhang’s efforts to develop versatile and ultra-specific bio-imaging tools from DNA and RNA for biomedical application were supported by two nationally competitive research fellowships: a K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Award by the National Institutes of Health (2012), and a Life Sciences Research Foundation award from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (2010). One of the results of Zhang’s postdoctoral research is the development of ultraspecific DNA and RNA hybridization probes that robustly discriminate single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) across a wide range of temperatures and salinities. Zhang is currently collaboratively pursuing the application of these probes in genetics, developmental biology, and point-of-care diagnostics.