Description of Research Expertise

I am a Research Associate in Mitchell Lazar’s lab in the Department of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, with more than 10 years of experience studying how genetic and environmental factors interact to drive metabolic disease. My primary expertise lies in understanding how epigenetic and 3D genome–mediated mechanisms control circadian rhythms and metabolic homeostasis. I have extensive experience utilizing in vivo rodent models and high-throughput genomic and epigenomic approaches to investigate how epigenetic modifiers regulate transcription in response to different signaling pathways (Zhu et al., Nucleic Acids Res. 2017; Wang and Zhu et al., J Cell Sci. 2012) and how nuclear receptor PPAR influences fatty liver disease (Zhu et al., PLoS Biol. 2018). Recently, my research on hepatic nuclear receptors and clock components has deepened our understanding of the role of circadian rhythms and 3D genome-mediated transcription in liver physiology, advancing this field into new dimensions (Zhu et al., Mol Cell. 2023).

My developing research program integrates cutting-edge functional genomics, AAV-based genetic perturbation, and neural circuit tracing to elucidate how circadian clocks and nuclear receptors regulate circadian food intake. I previously pioneered in vivo manipulation of hepatic genes and circadian rhythms using AAV-delivered CRISPR/Cas9 and shRNA systems (Zhu et al., Mol Cell. 2023). Building on this foundation, I have expanded this AAV-based CRISPR perturbation platform (“AAV-Perturb”) to multiple metabolic tissues, enabling large-scale loss-of-function genetic studies in vivo.