News

For full and up-to-date news, please click the group news page that is maintained by the Zhao lab members.

Aug 10, 2025
In early August, we attended the International Conference on Intelligent Biology and Medicine (ICIBM 2025) held at Ohio State University. Dr. Zhao gave an invited talk on predicting PPIs. Zhiyuan and Ziyu each presented a poster on their projects. Our works were well received! 🔥🔥

Jul 30, 2025
In July, we received the UT STAR Award (Rising STAR). We are grateful to the University of Texas System and UTMB for their trust and support!

Jul 20, 2025
In July, Rui Tang arrived in Galveston to begin his research internship with us. Jack (Plewa) Tiller started a rotation project focusing on aerospace omics, and Gary Sun, a talented undergraduate, joined us as an intern.

Earlier in June, Raymond Wang started an internship with us (remotely for now). Interestingly, Raymond and Gary are from the same school and same major (EE/CS, Berkeley) but they haven’t known each other. The world is small!

Welcome, Raymond, Jack, Rui and Gary!

May 30, 2025
In the end of May, our lab presented two posters at the UTMB Research Day. Both posters were popular!🔥🔥 Well done, Lauren and Ziyu!

May 15, 2025
In mid-May, Hao Wang arrived in Galveston to work with us in person for the summer and Vincent Thai joined us as a summer intern. Welcome, Hao and Vincent!

Apr 10, 2025
In Apr 2025, Dr. Barry Honig, pionner in protein eletrastatics, molecular biophysics and computational biology, visited UTMB. He met with our trainees at SCSB, engaged with lab members, and delivered a departmental seminar on neuronal self-recognition and clustered protocadherin protein. This work was later published in Nature.

Mar 1, 2025
In Mar 2025, Lauren Gansereit started doing rotation in our lab. Welcome, Lauren!

Feb 1, 2025
Our first collabration paper at UTMB was published. Dr. Zhao helped Dr. Sheng Zhang’s group at UT Health with the free energy calculation for the huntingtin HTT and Hap40 proteins. Through the hybrid structural and functional studies of the fly and human HTT-HAP40 complexes, this work demonstrated that structural similarity underlies the functional conservation of the two complexes in these evolutionarily distant species.

Jan 16, 2025
Dr. Zhiyuan Song joined us as a postdoc researcher. Maria Clara joined us as a rotation student. Ziyu Shi started working with us as a visiting student (currently remotely). Welcome, Zhiyuan, Maria and Ziyu!

Oct 1, 2024
Tate May joined us for a rotation project. Dr. Surendra Neggi joined us as a senior research scientist. Welcome, Tate and Surendra!

Sep 15, 2024
A local fellowship (NLM training program) is available for student and postdoc trainees. Please carefully read the program website and contact Dr. Zhao asap if you are interested. Application is due on Oct. 18, 2024. Mentors will draft up the application.

Sep 10, 2024
We currently have 1-2 postdoc, 1 technician, and 2 PhD student position openings. Click our Join page to find out more for each position. When you are ready, please email Dr. Zhao (hazhao@utmb.edu) with your CV, motivation and/or any thoughts if you are interested in joining us! 

Sep 9, 2024
Lab Website Is Live. We launched our group website at Github. Welcome to check it out and please let us know if you find any errors!
Ps: we thank Dr. Guang Shi for helpful discussions regarding using Eleventy or Jekyll – both of which are excellent static HTML website generators. We used a template written in Jekyll originally by Dr. Trevor Bedford. The source code is uploaded on GitHub.

Aug 30, 2024
New Lab Is Set. After crossing the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River, we arrived in Texas! Looking forward to a new start. Dr. Zhao's office will be at Rm 5.222, Research Building 6 (820 Market St, Galveston, TX). The lab space will be Rm 5.406 and 5.416, shared with Dr. Monte Pettitt's computational research group.