Shuguang Zhang

Director, Molecular Frontiers USA

Shuguang Zhang is the Associate Director of the Center for Biomedical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  He received his Ph.D. in biochemistry and molecular biology from University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB) and was a recipient of Regent Fellowship and a Graduate Mentor Fellowship at UCSB.  He was a past American Cancer Society Fellow at MIT.  He discovered a self-assembling peptide system while working in molecular and structural biology with Alexander Rich at MIT.  This serendipitous discovery was selected to be one of the fifteen research achievements over last quart century at MIT.  He pursues actively on the various self-assembling peptide systems to develop a new class of biological materials including peptide matrix scaffold for tissue engineering, biological surface engineering for cell pattern formation, molecular switch, biological operating systems and surfactant peptide nanotubes.  He also works on problems to gain understanding of a class of protein conformational diseases, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and the prion diseases (mad cow disease).  He holds three US patents and additional seven pending patents on the self-assembling peptide systems.

He is a Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and Sichuan University in Chengdu, China.  He is member of AAAS, American Society of Biochemistry and molecular Biology, the Human Genome Organization Americas, the Protein Society, New York Academy of Sciences, The International Society for the Study of Origin of Life, and the honorary society of Sigma Xi. 

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