Associate Professor of Biology
School of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering
East China Normal University
E-mail: Ljzhang@chem.ecnu.edu.cn
Lujia Zhang is an Associate Professor of Biology at East China Normal University. Prior to joining ECNU, he was an Assistant Professor and the Master Student Supervisor in the School of Biotechnology at East China University of Science and Technology. Zhang received his B.S. in Pharmaceutical Microbiology and M.S. in Biochemical Engineering from Nanjing Tech University, and his Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from East China University of Science and Technology. He was trained as a Postdoctoral Researcher at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in the lab of Prof. Grant J. Jensen (HHMI).
Zhang’s research interests are structure, function, and the mechanism of proteins, as well as the rational design of enzymes for industrial applications. With a combination of experiments and computation, he has discovered the structures (by crystallography) and the mechanisms of some important enzymes just like lipase, oxidordeuctase, and nitrilase. He has also developed many computational methods for the rational design of proteins, for example, the optimization of protein thermal stability based on charge-charge interaction refinement, changing coenzyme selectivity based on hydrogen bond reconstruction, and switching the enzyme production preferring based on the design of reaction pathway. Recently, he focused on the structures (by Cryo-EM) and interactions of multi protein biological macromolecules, including proteases and their protein substrates and GPCRs.