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 started to use molecular dynamics simulations to investigate nanoscale phenomena in ionic liquids. For his PhD, he studied histone assembly with Dr. Garegin Papoian and Dr. Yamini Dalal through the joint UMD-NCI partnership program between the University of Maryland and the National Cancer Institute of NIH. Through multi-scale computational simulations, his series of thesis works uncovered the folding principles and energetics of histones assembly, including their centromeric variant and associated chaperones. During his postdoc with Dr. Barry Honig at Columbia University Medical School, Dr. Zhao transitioned to systems biology, developing machine learning methods to predict genome-wide protein-protein interactions. He is broadly interested in applying physical sciences and ML/AI methods to study biology questions. Current projects include predicting host-pathogen interactomes and studying the post-translational machinery in epigenetics. Please click research page to find more.