Yunjie Zhao, PhD
Associate Professor
Institute of Biophysics
Department of Physics
Central China Normal University
Email: yjzhaowh@mail.ccnu.edu.cn

Bio: Dr. Yunjie Zhao received his PhD degree in 2012 from Huazhong University of Science & Technology, Wuhan, China. He is now an associate professor in Department of Physics at Central China Normal University. Before joining the university, he was a Research Scientist in Department of Physics at the George Washington University, USA. His doctoral research was about computational studies on the structure and dynamics of non-coding RNA. He developed automated and efficient nucleic acid structure modeling (3dRNA, Scientific Reports, 2012; Nucleic Acids Research, 2017) and evaluation (3dRNAscore, Nucleic Acids Research, 2015) programs. Another portion of his work centers on understanding the mechanisms of biomolecular regulations including STAT3 (Transcription, 2013), drug design (PloS one, 2014; Chem J Chinese U, 2017; Chinese Physics B, 2017; Bioinformatics 2018), MID1 proteins (PloS one, 2015), HDAC activity (Nature Immunology, 2016), and lectin redesign (Scientific Reports, 2017) that are involved in programmable cell death, birth defects, and other diseases. In short, the research program integrates molecular modeling, MD simulation, dynamical network analysis, and deep learning to tackle the human diseases at molecular level.