Dr. Xiaodong Zhang

Biography

Xiaodong Zhang studied Nuclear Physics at Peking University, China, and pursued his PhD in Physics at Stony Brook University, United States. He conducted research at Brookhaven National Laboratory, developing X-ray microscopy with chemical contrast. Earning his PhD, he transitioned to structural biology and undertook postdoctoral training in X-ray crystallography at Harvard University. In 1997, he moved to the UK and joined the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (now part of the Francis Crick Institute) as a postdoctoral researcher. He became a lecturer at Imperial College London in 2001 and was promoted to Reader in 2005, then to Professor of Macromolecular Structure and Function in 2008. He served as Director of the Imperial College Centre for Structural Biology from 2011 to 2014. In 2014, he moved to the Faculty of Medicine at Imperial College London to help establish the Section of Structural and Synthetic Biology while also being seconded to the Francis Crick Institute. His research focuses on understanding the mechanisms of molecular machines, particularly those involved in DNA processing and transcription machinery related to DNA damage signaling and repair. Zhang is a recipient of the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award and the Wellcome Trust Investigator Award, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2024 and of the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) in 2016.

Research Interests

Experience

Awards