(Boston)—Lexington resident Chao Zhang, PhD, assistant professor of medicine/computational biomedicine at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine, has received a five-year, $2.2M R35 grant from the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences for his project, “A Deep Learning Framework for Discovering Temporal Changes in Host-Microbiome Interactions.”
With this new grant, Zhang will develop novel artificial intelligence (AI) frameworks to investigate how host-microbiome interactions change over time. The project aims to characterize dynamic immune cell recruitment, uncover mechanisms underlying drug resistance, and determine how the microbiome influences the host epigenome through longitudinal multi-omics data integration.
Zhang holds a PhD in computer science and an MS in statistics, and has extensive research experience in cancer, stem cell biology, and neurodegenerative diseases. His interdisciplinary background uniquely positions him to bridge systems biology, statistics, machine learning, software engineering, and next-generation sequencing analysis to address complex biomedical questions.