Education: PhD, 1996, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, USA.

Employment: Professor, Department of Pathobiology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, USA.

Dr. Zhang was trained at the fields of molecular biology, microbiology and vaccinology. He initially studied molecular pathogenesis of individual enterotoxins of Escherichia coli strains (ETEC) in diarrheal disease using gnotobiotic (germ-free) piglets, and later focused on ETEC vaccine research and development. His vaccine strategy is to target all ETEC enterotoxins and all or the most important ETEC adhesins (two types of virulence determinants in ETEC diarrhea) to develop broadly protective vaccines against the heterogeneous ETEC bacteria. By applying toxoids and toxoid fusions as safe and immunogenic antigens, suitable animal challenge models, and a novel epitope- and structure-based vaccinology platform multiepitope fusion antigen (MEFA), his lab is developing broadly protective multivalent vaccines for pig post-weaning diarrhea (PWD), children’s diarrhea and travelers’ diarrhea, as well as combination vaccines against enteric diseases.