Liyun Zhang, PhD

Dr. Liyun Zhang joined the University of Pittsburgh after working as an Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University. She began her career as an ophthalmologist at Beijing Tong Ren Hospital, Eye Center. While treating patients, she became increasingly interested in the genetic causes of eye diseases. As a result, she pursued her PhD studies in eye genetics at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. After earning her degree, she continued postdoctoral training at Purdue University, the University of Cincinnati, and Johns Hopkins University. In 2022, she started her own research program at the Wilmer Eye Institute at Johns Hopkins as an Assistant Professor. Her medical practice informed her decision to specialize in research related to ocular genetics.

Dr. Zhang’s research focuses on identifying potential treatments and mechanisms for genetic diseases in the retina. She uses zebrafish to test large samples of different drugs. Dr. Zhang first began working with zebrafish as a postdoc, where she learned that zebrafish eyes have similar genetic and cell composition to human eyes. She identified gene mutations that cause eye disease in her PhD, and in her postdoc she expanded into translational research.

One goal of Dr. Zhang’s research is to mimic how eye diseases progress. She tests which drugs are most effective at preserving cells after they have been introduced to an enzyme that could kill them. To accomplish this, Dr. Zhang injects RNA into the zebrafish and studies how the RNA impacts the fish’s reaction to the enzyme. She uses fluorescence labeling to see how many cells were killed, displaying the cells in a microplate reader to see many samples at once. She then uses mice studies to validate her findings from the zebrafish.

In the future, Dr. Zhang hopes to find combinations of drugs that will effectively treat retinal degeneration in humans and to discover what causes the degeneration to occur.