Postdoc
University of California, San Diego
La Jolla, California, United States
My name is Zhongchao (Kevin) Zhao, Ph.D., a postdoc from Dr. Nicole Steinmetz’s lab in the Department of NanoEngineering at the University of California, San Diego. Coming from a small village where there was never a kid who made it into college, I started my own journey to become a scientist. Through years of training, I gained expertise in genetic engineering, biochemistry, nanoengineering, and biomedical research. I obtained my bachelor’s degree in Bioengineering and master’s degree in Biochemical Engineering from the China University of Mining and Technology-Beijing. During my master program, using genetic engineering, I studied the mechanism of copper homeostasis in bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans R1. At Indiana University, I completed my PhD program in biochemistry under the mentorship of Dr. Adam Zlotnick. My research was focused on investigating the regulatory mechanism of the Hepatitis B virus (HBV) capsid assembly process and engineering novel capsid assembly pathways and structures using structural biology and other biochemical and biophysical methods. As a postdoc in Dr. Nicole Steinmetz’s lab, my research focus transitioned from fundamental research to application-oriented research by engineering plant viruses for cancer nanomedicine development: tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) for chemotherapeutic delivery and cowpea mosaic virus (CPMV) for cancer immunotherapy. Building upon my productive training career with 10 papers (1 submitted) from my PhD and 12 papers (5 are submitted) from my postdoc, I will develop an interdisciplinary research program focusing on (1) the engineering of therapeutic VLP candidates for multi-functional cancer immunotherapies (the aims of my K99/R00 proposal) and (2) using directed evolutionary approaches to develop various next-generation VLP species with highly-defined structure-and-function capabilities, build-in programming in responsive to environmental stimuli, and abilities for genomic materials packaging for applications including vaccine development, gene delivery, cancer immunotherapy, etc.
Co-delivery of Tumor Antigen with Plant Virus as An Effective Ovarian Cancer Vaccine
Friday, October 13, 2023
2:45 PM – 3:00 PM PDT