Youming Zhang

Biography

Youming Zhang is a Lecturer in Respiratory Genomics and the Head of Functional Genomics Group of Genomic Medicine Section in National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College London. Dr Zhang was trained as a physician from Tong Ji Medical University, China. He had further clinical and research training and obtained a Master degree in Medicine from Peking Union Medical College. He then worked as a Clinical Research Fellow in Paediatrics at Beijing Children’s Hospital. He was awarded K.C Wong scholarship and ORS from the University of Oxford that allowed him to study a DPhil in Oxford. He focused his research in the field of asthma genetics at Oxford Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics. His doctoral work was on mapping quantitative traits loci (QTL) of asthma in mice (Zhang Y, et al., Hum Mol Genet 1999). After completing his DPhil study in 1999, Dr Zhang began to work on the positional cloning of the asthma locus on human chromosome 13, and eventually cloned PHF11/SETDB2 genes as asthma suspected genes (Zhang Y. et al., Nature Genetics 2003). In 2006, Dr Zhang was appointed as a Research Council UK Fellow at Imperial College London. This fellowship allowed him the autonomy to develop his work on asthma genetics in mice and human. Consequently he established a conditional knockout mouse program to dissect the newly identified asthma gene ORMDL3. He also established two mutagenesis mouse lines of PHF11 and DPP10. In addition, he also led to establish the cell model to investigate the global gene regulation during immunoglobulin class switch recombination in human B cells. Dr Zhang focuses his work on the function of the novel genes in respiratory diseases. Recently, the group defined the function roles of polymorphisms of asthma novel genes (Holt RJ, et al., JACI 2011, Zhang Y et al., Mammalian Genome, 2014, Holt RJ, et al., Genes and Immunity, 2015). The group applies state-of-art genomics approaches such as siRNA, gene overexpression, global gene expression profiling, RNA sequencing, ChIP sequencing and metabolite screening to dissect the pathways of the novel genes in disease path-physiology.

Research Interest

Immunobiology