Dr. Zhu obtained his bachelor’s degree in Biology from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). During his college years, he took most of the core courses in the Physics and Chemistry departments, which led to a quantitative approach in his later research.

From 1998 to 2002, Dr. Zhu pursued his PhD with Prof. Yunyu Shi, a member of Chinese Academy, and explored diverse topics such as structure-based ligand design, protein folding, and molecular simulation. In 2002, Dr. Zhu joined Dr. Barry Honig’s lab at Columbia University and Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) as a research fellow. During his postdoctoral research, Dr. Zhu worked on methods development for protein structure prediction and applied these tools to cryo-EM and ion channels.

In 2009, Dr. Zhu moved to the Vaccine Research Center (VRC) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as a staff scientist. His work at NIH pioneered the next-generation sequencing (NGS) analysis of HIV-1 broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs) with a number of key publications on this subject.

In 2013, Dr. Zhu started his own lab at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2017. The Zhu lab is currently working on antibody research, rational vaccine design, and neuroscience.