Founding Members

Prof Mingjie Zhang was born in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province in Sept. 1966. He obtained his bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Fudan University, Shanghai in 1988, and his Ph.D. degree in Biochemistry in the University of Calgary, Canada in 1994. After a brief postdoctoral training in the Ontario Cancer Institute, Toronto, Canada, he established his own laboratory as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) in 1995. Before becoming to be the Founding Dean of School of Life Sciences at SUSTech, Prof Zhang was a Kerry Holdings Professor of Science, Senior Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study, and Chair Professor in the Division of Life Science, HKUST.

Research in Prof Zhang’s laboratory has been focusing on mechanistic basis of neuronal synapse formation and plasticity in the past 30 years. Zhang’s lab has been approaching these two fundamental questions in neuroscience by a combination of structural biology, biochemistry, and cell biology approaches. Prof. Zhang’s discovery and systematic research on phase separation in synaptic biology have far-reaching impacts in biology and medicine. Prof. Zhang has published more than 250 research articles in the prestigious scientific journals including Science, Cell, Nature, Mol Cell, Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, Neuron, PNAS, EMBO J, etc. Prof Zhang’s laboratory is recognized as a world-leading laboratory in the area of neuronal structural biology. Additionally, Prof Zhang has won a number of awards (e.g. 2006 State Natural Science Award, 2003/2020 Croucher Foundation Senior Research Fellow Award, 2011 Ho Leung Ho Lee Foundation Prize for Scientific and technological Progress, the CC Tan Life-time Achievement Award in Life Science etc) for his excellence in scientific research. Prof Zhang was elected as a member of The Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2011. Prof Zhang has been dedicating huge amount of his energy in training younger generation of scientists. More than 25 of Ph.D. graduates and postdoctoral fellows trained in his lab have established their independent research groups around the world.

Website of Prof Mingjie Zhang at Southern University of Science and Technology

May 2025