Assistant Professor, Department of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Sciences Dr. Zhang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Sciences at the College of Pharmacy. His research focuses on geroscience drug discovery, with the goal of developing gerotherapeutic interventions that target the hallmarks of aging to extend healthy longevity and treat age-related diseases. To accelerate drug discovery in aging biology, his lab leverages machine learning and artificial intelligence, alongside high-throughput screening, high-content imaging, virtual screening, computer-aided drug design, medicinal chemistry, multi-omics, bioinformatics, and biochemical, molecular, and cellular approaches. Dr. Zhang brings a uniquely interdisciplinary background across chemistry, biology, and computational science. He earned his PhD in Drug Design and Medicinal Chemistry from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, where he focused on organic synthesis and small-molecule drug discovery for type 2 diabetes. He then expanded into biology during his first postdoctoral training at the University of Colorado, working on Toll-like receptors and innate immunity. During this time, he became deeply interested in aging as the major risk factor and root cause of many chronic diseases. Motivated by this, he pursued a second postdoctoral fellowship in aging research in the lab of Dr. Paul Robbins at the Scripps Research Institute and the University of Minnesota, where he was promoted to Research Assistant Professor and served as the Manager of the Drug Discovery Core. His work there focused on developing novel senotherapeutics, drugs targeting senescent cells, through drug screening, drug design, and machine learning, as well as studying aging biology using genetic and pharmacological approaches. Education: Ph.D., Drug Design and Medicinal Chemistry, Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, China B.E., Pharmaceutical Engineering and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China Research Research Interests: The Zhang Lab focuses on geroscience-guided drug discovery, with the goal of developing novel gerotherapeutics that target the biology of aging to promote healthy longevity and treat age-related diseases. To achieve these goals, we employ a multidisciplinary discovery pipeline that combines high-throughput screening, high-content imaging, virtual screening, computer-aided drug design, and medicinal chemistry with machine learning and artificial intelligence. In parallel, we apply biochemical, molecular, and cellular biology techniques, together with multi-omics and bioinformatics approaches, to elucidate drug mechanisms, validate therapeutic targets, and uncover new regulators of aging and age-related diseases.
