Dr. Yazhen Zhu

Biography

Yazhen Zhu is an Assistant Professor and Research Pathologist in the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. She received her MD from Wuhan University in 2005 and completed her PhD in Pathology at Fudan University in 2010. In 2012, she finished her residency in Pathology at the Department of Guangdong Provincial Hospital of TCM in China, where she worked as an attending pathologist for five years, focusing on surgical pathology for various cancers. From 2013 to 2017, Dr. Zhu served as the founding Director of the Molecular Pathology Laboratory at the Department of Pathology, developing laboratory-developed tests for oncogenic mutations in targeted cancer therapy. In 2015, she joined UCLA as a visiting assistant project scientist at the Pharmacology Department. By 2020, she became a faculty member of the Crump Institute for Molecular Imaging, emphasizing her expertise in molecular pathology and translational research in cancer diagnostics. At UCLA, Dr. Zhu co-directs the liquid biopsy laboratory, where her primary research interests include exploring liquid biopsy markers and developing non-invasive diagnostic platforms for cancer and prenatal diagnosis.

Research Interests