Yongli Zhang, PhD

Forces hold everything together and determine the structures and dynamics of macromolecules. The Zhang Laboratory of Single-Molecule Biophysics and Biochemistry has a broad range of interests and expertise in measuring intra- and inter-molecular forces, as well as the forces generated by molecular machines at the single-molecule level. Their main tool is the combination of high-resolution optical tweezers and single-molecule fluorescence microscopy, which enables simultaneous manipulation and visualization of single molecules in real-time. This approach allows them to study the dynamic structures of proteins that are difficult to access using other experimental methods. The lab's primary focus is on mechanical forces in biology and the dynamics of membranes and membrane proteins involved in fundamental biological processes and human diseases, including SNARE proteins mediating exocytosis, lipid transfer proteins involved in lipid homeostasis and organelle biogenesis, and the mechanosensitive channel NOMPC that senses sound and touch.

biochemistry ;  biophysics ;  computational modeling ;  deep learning ;  hardware design ;  language models ;  optical imaging  

algorithms ;  artificial intelligence ;  cellular neuroscience ;  computational biology ;  machine learning ;  mental health ;  neurons ;  synapses  

Zhang is a professor in the Department of Cell Biology and of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University. He earned his bachelor’s degree in applied physics from Fudan University and a master’s degree in theoretical physics from the Institute of Theoretical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. In 2003, he completed his PhD in biophysics at Yale. Dr. Zhang was a Jane Coffin Childs Postdoctoral Fellow in Carlos Bustamante’s lab at UC Berkeley. He established his research lab at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 2007 and was recruited back to Yale in 2009.