Lixin, Zhang

Biography

Prof. Lixin Zhang, Ph.D. Principal Investigator, Director of Drug Discovery Center for Tuberculosis, Deputy Director of CAS Key Laboratory of Pathogenic Microbiology & Immunology. He was recognized as an Awardee of “One Hundred Talents Program” of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in 2006 and was ranked outstanding at the Final Review Board Meeting (2011). He was also recognized as the Excellent Supervisor of CAS in 2011 and as an Awardee for National Distinguished Young Scholar Program, China. He was awarded the Chief Scientist of a “973 Program” in 2012. He co-edited a book with Prof. Arnold Demain on natural products by Humana Press. He served as an Executive Board Member of International Symposium on the Biology of Actinomycetes (ISBA) and The International Chemical Biology Society (ICBS). He was recognized as an Honorary lifetime member, Sino-American Pharmaceutical Professional Association (SAPA). The long-term goal of his research is to discover and develop synergistic medicines from marine microbial natural products. His research is focused on: Diversifying marine microbial natural product library; screening for synergistic medicines in a high throughput manner; increasing the production of drugable secondary metabolites from microbial producers by synthetic biology. His Avermectin project won Award for “Excellence to improve science and technologies” and the paper was published in PNAS. He has published six books, more than 130 papers and holds 12 PCT patents. He has been appointed as an associate Editor-in-Chief for “Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology”,“Frontiers in Antimicrobials, Resistance and Chemotherapy” and on the editorial board of 7 other peer-reviewed journals: Frontiers in Antimicrobials, Resistance and Chemotherapy，Marine Biotechnology, Journal of Antibiotics, Journal of Biomolecular Screening, The Bulletin of BISMiS, Chinese Journal of Antibiotics and Chinese Journal of Biotechnology. He is awarded as a visiting Professor (2012-4) in Cornell University and a visiting Professor (2013-5) at Harvard University.

Research Interest

The long-term goal of the research is to discover and develop synergistic medicines from marine microbial natural products and increase their outputs through synthetic biology approaches. 1、Diversify marine microbial natural product strains and extract libraries, decrease genetic and chemical redundancy.  2、Screening for synergistic medicines in a high throughput manner. 3、Increasing the production of drugable secondary metabolites from microbial producers by genetic engineering.