Opsin-free Optogenetics

Yubin Zhou. Dr. Yubin Zhou is currently a professor, Presidential Impact Fellow, and American Cancer Society Research Scholar in the Institute of Biosciences and Technology at Texas A&M University. He is also a faculty in the Department of Translational Medical Sciences, School of Medicine at Texas A&M University. Dr. Zhou received his medical training in internal medicine from Zhejiang University School of Medicine. He thereafter earned his M.S. degree in Chemistry and Bioinformatics (2007), as well as his Ph.D. degree in Chemistry and Virology (2008), from Georgia State University. After receiving his postdoctoral training as a Leukemia & Lymphoma Society Fellow at Harvard Medical School (2008-2010) and later working as an instructor at La Jolla Institute for Immunology (2010-2012), Dr. Zhou launched a vibrant research program centered on synthetic immunology and bioengineering at Texas A&M University.

A tight integration among mechanistic studies, biomedical engineering, and translational sciences is a hallmark of Dr. Zhou's research. His group is surfing at the frontier of three research areas: (1) pioneering chemical and synthetic biology approaches for precise and programmable control of protein activity and cell physiology; (2) illuminating novel regulatory mechanisms of signal transduction that remain unresolved in calcium signaling and T cell activation or exhaustion; and (3) developing conditionally-active biologics and cell-based therapies for cancer treatment and neuromodulation.

Dr. Zhou has published over 140 peer-reviewed research papers and organized several prominent national and international conferences in calcium signaling and optogenetics. He currently serves as the associate editor for Current Molecular Medicine, and sits on the editorial boards of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Chronic Disease and Translational Medicine, and Frontiers in Molecular Biosciences. Molecular tools created by Zhou lab have been widely distributed to 200+ research laboratories across the globe.

Kai Zhang. Dr. Kai Zhang is an Associate Professor and Scialog Fellow in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He is an affiliate faculty to the Beckman Institute, Neuroscience Program, Center for Biophysics and Quantitative Biology, Cancer Center at Illinois at UIUC. Dr. Zhang received his Bachelor of Science from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in 2002 and a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley in 2008. During his training at Stanford University as an American Cancer Society postdoctoral fellow, he made a transition from the field of physical chemistry to neurobiology. In August 2014, Dr. Zhang joined the Biochemistry Department of UIUC as a tenure-track assistant professor.

At Illinois, Dr. Zhang has established a multi-disciplinary research program by integrating his expertise in biochemistry, biophysics, bioengineering, and neuroscience. The Zhang lab uses a synthetic biology approach to understand how physiological signaling processes are compromised in diseases and develops enabling biotechnologies to restore impaired cell functions. The key focus of his research program includes 1) promoting neural regeneration after injury 2) dynamic controlling of cell fate determination during embryonic development, 3) establishing generalizable optogenetic strategies for post-translational control of protein activity, and 4) developing biosensors with new nanomaterials.

Dr. Zhang has published more than 50 peer-reviewed research articles. Every year, he enjoys teaching Physical Biochemistry to junior, senior undergraduate students, and first-year graduate students. He received the Innovative Teaching and Learning Grant to promote interactive learning in the classroom. He serves as the Associate Editor of the Journal of Molecular Biology and Frontiers in Molecular Neuroscience. Prior to this book, Dr. Zhang edited a special issue on chemo- and optogenetics for the Journal of Molecular Biology.