Dr. Zhao is an assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the Sealy Center for Structural Biology and Molecular Biophysics at UTMB. His interests in studying biological complexity went back to his college time especially from reading Schrödinger’s book What is Life?. In his undergraduate time, he used molecular dynamics simulations to investigate ionic liquids under external electric fields. During his PhD, he studied histone assembly with Dr. Garegin Papoian and Dr. Yamini Dalal through the joint UMD-NCI partnership program between University of Maryland and National Cancer Institute. Through multi-scale molecular modelings, his series of thesis works uncovered the energetics and folding principles of histones assembly, including their centromeric variant and associated chaperones. During his postdoc with Dr. Barry Honig at Columbia University, Dr. Zhao transitioned to systems biology, developing ML/AI methods to predict genome-wide protein-protein interactions. His research lab at UTMB develops and applies integrative computational methods to study protein-protein interactions focusing on both their molecular biophysics and system-level interaction networks. More research can be read here.