Speaker

Dr. Z. Hong Zhou (周正洪) is currently a professor in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Molecular Genetics at UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine and the founding director of the Electron Imaging Center for NanoMachines (http://www.EICN.ucla.edu) of California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) at UCLA. Zhou was a Pew scholar and a Burton medalist.

With a doctorate from Baylor College of Medicine and bachelor’s degree from University of Science and Technology of China, Zhou made pioneering contribution in cryo electron microscopy (cryoEM). His group demonstrated experimentally the construction of backbone model (Yu et al., Nature 2008) and atomic models (Zhang et al., Cell, 2010 and Liu et al., Science 2010) of large biological machines solely by cryoEM. By cryoEM, his group also determined genome structures inside viruses (Zhang et al., Nature, 2015; Dai et al., Nature 2017; Liu et al., Nature 2019) and atomic models of herpesviruses (Yu et al., Science 2017; Dai et all, Nature 2019, Science 2018; Gong et al., Cell 2019). In recent years, Zhou has shifted his cryoEM efforts to smaller complexes such as the aging/cancer-related telomerase (Jiang et al., Nature 2013; Science 2015; Cell 2018), gene-editing related spliceosomes (Liu et al., Science 2017; Li et al., Nature 2019), drug design-related membrane proteins (Jiang et al, Nature 2015; Ho et al., Nature 2018) and precision medicine nanomachines (Ge et al., Nature 2020), with contribution to method development for both cryoEM with the cryoID method (DOI: 10.1038/s41592-019-0637-y) and cryo electron tomography with the IsoNet package (doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.07.17.452128) for studying cellular structures at atomic and molecular resolutions, respectively.

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