Brief Biography
Dr. Shuguang Zhang is in the Center for Biomedical Engineering at the
Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. He
received his Ph.D. in genetics, biochemistry and molecular biology from
University
of California at Santa Barbara
(UCSB). He was an American Cancer
Society Fellow at MIT. He
worked on structure of DNA and RNA as well as molecular genetics. He
serendipitously discovered a
self-assembling peptide system while working in molecular and structural
biology with Alexander
Rich at MIT. This discovery was selected to be one of the 15 research
achievements over last quarter
century at MIT in 1994. He invented various self-assembling peptide systems
to develop new classes
of
biological materials including peptide scaffolds for tissue engineering,
biological surface
engineering, molecular switches, and lipid-like peptide surfactants for
stabilizing membrane proteins
and their complexes. He also tries to gain understanding of a class of
protein conformational
diseases, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and the prion diseases (mad cow
disease). He holds 5
US
patents and 15 additional pending patents on various self-assembling peptide
systems.
Dr. Zhang is an honorary professor and a Distinguished Changjiang Scholar at
Sichuan University
in
Chengdu, China. He is also a visiting professor of Qinghua University, of
Chinese Academy of
Medical Science in Beijing and of China University of Petroleum in Qingdao.
He is member of
American Association of Advancement for Science, American Society of
Biochemistry and
molecular Biology, the Human Genome Organization Americas, the Protein
Society, New York
Academy of Sciences, International Society for the Study of Origin of Life,
and the honorary
society of Sigma Xi. He is a 2003 Fellow of Japan Society for Promotion of
Science (JSPS fellow)
and a 2005 Fellow of Japan Advancement for Medical Instrument. His work on
designer peptide
scaffold won 2004 R&D100 award. His and his colleagues’ work on biosolar
energy was selected to
be the Top 100
Science Stories in 2004 by
Discover
Magazine.
His team’s work on biosolar
nanodevice was
selected to be one of the 10 finalists of the
2005 Saatchi &
Saatchi Award for World
Changing Ideas.
He is one of the 2006 John Simon
Guggenheim Fellows. He is a recipient of 2006
Wilhelm Exner Medal from Vienna, Austria.
