Zinan Zhang

Zinan is a MD-PhD student at Harvard Medical School and will complete his medical degree upon completion of his PhD. He graduated summa cum laude in Chemistry with certificates in Neuroscience and Global Health and Health Policy from Princeton University. His thesis: “Modulation of Quorum Sensing and Pyocyanin in Pseudomonas aeruginosa” was a culmination of three years of research in Dr. Martin Semmelhack’s, Dr. Frederick Hughson’s, and Dr. Bonnie Bassler’s labs. Based on his thesis and exceptional performance in organic chemistry, he was awarded the Everett S. Wallis Prize in Organic Chemistry. During his college years, he also received various scholarships to do organocatalysis research at the University of Edinburgh and optogenetics research at the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich. His research has been published in ACS Chemical Neuroscience and Journal of Medicinal Chemistry. To bridge his synthetic chemistry and biomedical interests, he spent the year after college learning electrophysiology and x-ray crystallography of membrane proteins at NIH and doing cancer drug discovery at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. 

He is excited about the future of chemical biology and aspires to be a physician-scientist working on developing novel therapeutics to combat neurodegeneration or cancer.