Ming Zhang obtained her Bachelor’s degree and her PhD degree in Department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry from Nankai University with a research focus on disease-causing gene identification and signaling pathway analysis. She then pursued her Postdoctoral training in the University of Rochester in New York, USA and joined Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine as a Research Associate Faculty and obtained her certificate of genetics and genome analysis. Her research interest is to develop new NGS technologies and to apply them to cancer diagnostics and therapeutics.
Ming is the only Research Faculty focusing on cancer genome under the direction of Dr. Bert Vogelstein. In recent years, she has finished large-scale cancer genome analysis for numerous human cancers, including pancreatic cancer, GI track cancers, brain cancer, and endometrial cancer, etc. By defining the genomic landscapes of these cancers, her work has supported the identification of cancer-associated biomarkers and therapeutic targets including several kinases and metabolic enzymes, which are now prevailing drug targets under investigation of major pharmaceutical companies. A lot of genetic biomarkers have been identified from Ming’s work for early cancer diagnostics and many of them have been approved by WHO and are being used in hospitals globally. In the recent 5 years, Ming and Dr. Vogelstein have published over 30 research papers together on high profile scientific journals, such as The New England Journal of Medicine, Nature Genetics, PNAS, Cancer Discovery, Gastroenterology etc., and her recent findings have been cited for over 4000 times.
