DrYouming Zhang

Youming Zhang is an Asmarley Lecturer in Respiratory Genomics and the Head of Functional Genomics Group of Genomic Medicine Section in National Heart and Lung Institute at Imperial College London.

Dr Zhang was trained as a physician from Tong Ji Medical University, China. He had further clinical and research training and obtained a Master degree in Medicine from Peking Union Medical College. He then worked as a Clinical Research Fellow in Paediatrics at Beijing Children’s Hospital. He was awarded K.C Wong scholarship and ORS from the University of Oxford that allowed him to study a DPhil at Oxford Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics. His doctoral work was on mapping quantitative traits loci (QTL) of asthma in mice After completing his DPhil study in 1999, Dr Zhang began to work on the positional cloning of the asthma locus on human chromosome 13, and eventually cloned PHF11/SETDB2 genes as asthma suspected genes. In 2006, Dr Zhang was appointed as a Research Council UK Fellow at Imperial College London. This fellowship allowed him the autonomy to develop his work on asthma genetics in mice and human. Consequently, he established a conditional knockout mouse program to dissect the newly identified asthma gene ORMDL3. He also established two mutagenesis mouse lines of PHF11 and DPP10. In addition, he also led to establish the cell model to investigate the global gene regulation during immunoglobulin class switch recombination in human B cells.

Dr Zhang focuses his work on the function of the novel genes in respiratory diseases. Recently, the group defined the function roles of polymorphisms of asthma novel genes. The group applies state-of-art genomics approaches such as siRNA, gene overexpression, global gene expression profiling, RNA sequencing, ChIP sequencing and metabolite screening to dissect the pathways of the novel genes in disease path-physiology. Recently Dr Zhang has established ORMDL3 knockout and GSDMB knockout epithelial cell lines. The platforms provide powerful resources to dissect their functions for sphingolipids metabolism, cell stress, glycolysis, human rhinovirus infection and pyroptosis in inflammatory response. Dr Zhang is also interested in the roles of novel genes in the development of epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT).

Dr Zhang also actively collaborates with physicians and scientists nationally and internationally. At Imperial College, he collaborates with Dr Charlotte Dean, Professor Kazuhiro Ito, Professor Daqing Ma, Professors William Cookson, Professor Miriam Moffatt and Professor Clare Lloyd to dissect the functional roles of the interested genes. He collaborates with Professor Reena Ghildyal at University of Canberra, Australia to work on programmed cell death in rhinovirus-driven asthma exacerbations.

Dr Zhang is an academic tutor for MBBS students at Imperial College. He also works as a member of BMB Core Faculty group at the college. He is a module lead of Pharmacogenomics in MSC course of Genomic Medicine at NHLI, Imperial College London.