Lixin Zhang's Biography

Lixin Zhang, Professor, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Prof. Lixin Zhang is a Deputy Director of CAS Key Laboratory of Pathogenic Microbiology & Immunology, Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IMCAS). Before joining IMCAS in 2006, Dr. Zhang worked in 3 pharmaceutical companies in USA: SynerZ, Cetek and Microbia, Inc. He received his Ph. D. degree in Institute of Applied Ecology, CAS and did his postdoc at Emory University, USA. He has published seven books, more than 100 papers and holds eleven PCT patents. He co-edited a book with Prof. Arnold Demain on natural products in 2005 by Humana Press. He served as an Executive Board Member of International Symposium on the Biology of Actinomycetes (ISBA) and The International Chemical Biology Society (ICBS). He was recognized as an Honorary lifetime member, Sino-American Pharmaceutical Professional Association (SAPA). He has been appointed as an associate Editor-in-Chief for “Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology” and on the editorial board of 6 other peer-reviewed journals. The long-term goal of his research is to discover and develop synergistic medicines from marine microbial natural products. His research is focused on: Diversifying marine microbial natural product library; screening for synergistic medicines in a high throughput manner; increasing the production of drugable secondary metabolites from microbial producers by synthetic biology (serve as a chief PI for a 973 program). His Avermectin project won Award for "Excellence to improve science and technologies” and the paper was published in PNAS. He was recognized as an Awardee for National Distinguished Young Scholar Program, China.