PROFESSOR | Genetics and Genomic Sciences PROFESSOR | Pharmacological Sciences

Dr. Zhang is a Professor of the https://icahn.mssm.edu/research/genomics Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences and is Director of the https://icahn.mssm.edu/research/transformative-disease-modeling Mount Sinai Center for Transformative Disease Modeling. Dr. Zhang’s extensive experience in electrical engineering, computer science and computational biology empowers him to build up highly predictive models for very complex data from handwritten document images to large-scale cancer genomic data. Over the past decade, Dr. Zhang has developed and significantly contributed a series of influential gene network inference algorithms which have been extensively used for identification of novel pathways and gene targets, as well as development of drugs for a variety of human diseases such as cancer, atherosclerosis, Alzheimer's, obesity and diabetes. His latest research that uncovered dramatic changes in gene-gene interaction patterns in Alzheimer’s disease and pinpointed an immune/microglia gene network as the top pathway causally linked to the disease was just published in Cell. His recent research that sheds a new light on targeted therapies against breast cancer was featured by the Second AACR International Conference on Frontiers in Basic Cancer Research (San Francisco, September 14-18, 2011). His work on predicting genetic interactions was identified by Nature Biotechnology as one of the breakthroughs in the field of computational biology in 2010. The discovery of a gene cluster that is causally linked to obesity and diabetes was highlighted in Nature in 2008. His early research on image pattern recognition significantly contributed to several large-scale pattern recognition systems including U.S. Handwritten Address Identification System which has been adopted by US Postal Office. Dr. Zhang was a recipient of the Best Paper Award of ICDAR 2003 ─ the Seventh International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition. As a prolific researcher, Dr. Zhang has published a number of high profile papers in Nature, Science, Cell, Nature Genetics, and PNAS. As of April 2015, his publications have been cited 7131 times. Furthermore, he has been a leader of more than a dozen projects to identify novel drug targets for several pharmaceutical companies. For more information about Dr. Zhang's research, please visit http://research.mssm.edu/multiscalenetwork http://research.mssm.edu/multiscalenetwork . Multi-Disciplinary Training Areas Genetics and Genomic Sciences [GGS], Neuroscience [NEU] Education BE, Tongji University MS, State University of New York at Buffalo MS, Tsinghua University PhD, State University of New York at Buffalo