Biography

Dr. Zhang will join Rice University as an Assistant Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in January 2027. She earned a B.S. degree in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from Cornell University in 2017 and a Ph.D. in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2022. Her doctoral research with Mark Styczynski focused on developing point-of-need diagnostics by integrating cell-free biosensors with material interfaces to enable quantitative and multiplexed analysis. She then pursued postdoctoral research with Richard Murray and William Clemons at the California Institute of Technology as a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow and an NIH MOSAIC K99/R00 Fellow. Her research focuses on adaptive cell-free gene expression platforms to engineer bacteriophage-based therapeutics. She will join Rice as a CPRIT Scholar in Cancer Research, working to translate biosensor and bacteriophage engineering into early detection and targeted removal of cancer-associated bacteria.

Research Areas

The Zhang Lab is a platform innovation lab drawing on expertise in cell-free synthetic biology, molecular programming, and microbial engineering. The lab is organized around three themes: understanding the molecular machinery that living cells rely on, recapitulating that machinery in cell-free gene expression systems, and writing and testing molecular programs that function in both cell-free reactions and living cells. These projects share a foundational set of methods, including proteomic characterization, biochemical reconstitution, genome assembly, and protein structure-guided design. The group's current applications focus on human health, including point-of-need diagnostics and bacteriophage-based therapeutics, though the platforms themselves are not limited to that domain.