Research Summary and Interests

Dr. Zhang’s research has been focused on applications of laser spectroscopy, optical imaging, microscopy in the fields of physical chemistry and biophysics. Currently Dr. Zhang is studying the following topics:

Molecular interaction between nanoparticles and membrane proteins.

Cellular uptake of nanoparticles is a very critical process for the application of nanotechnology in medicine. The topic is also of importance for basic science, e.g. providing analogy for understanding viral infections mechanism, a very important topic for cell biology and public health.
Dr. Zhang is currently studying the molecular interactions in the endocytosis process by utilizing various optical microscopy (including single molecule methods) and laser spectroscopy technologies.

Intracellular trafficking of nanoparticles

The intracellular trafficking is also very important for nanoparticles to fulfill their function as nanomedicine. Dr. Zhang has developed a data analysis method to improve the precision of locating nanoparticles to be beyond the optical resolution. Thus, the intracellular trafficking of nanoparticles could be monitored in real time in living cells with high accuracy. Utilizing this technique and other optical methods, Dr. Zhang is investigating the intracellular trafficking process with emphasis on the roles of a few key organelles in affecting the intracellular trafficking of nanoparticles.

Protein conformational dynamics and interactions with DNA

Lots of proteins perform their functions via conformational change. In order to understand the workings machineries of cells, it is necessary to first understand the protein dynamics. Laser spectroscopy and single molecule spectroscopy are great tools for these studies. Currently Dr. Zhang is applying these tools to study the activation process of membrane receptor proteins and transcriptional regulator proteins. He is also exploring the interaction of transcription proteins with DNAs.