Associate Professor Zhongyu Yang joins our journal team

Name: Zhongyu Yang

Title: Associate Professor

Position: Editorial Board Member

Affiliation: Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, North Dakota State University, Fargo, North Dakota 58102, United States

Research Interest: Metal-Organic Framework; Polymeric Materials

Website: https://www.ndsu.edu/chemistry/people/teaching_and_research_faculty/zhongyu_yang/

Publications(Scopus/WoS/Google scholar/etc.):

https://www.scopus.com/authid/detail.uri?authorId=56171396900

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=C74QDdAAAAAJ&hl=en

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Zhongyu-Yang-3

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3018-3608

Zhongyu joined NDSU in 2015 after receiving his BS from the University of Science and Technology of China in 2004 and his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh in 2010. He also served as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles through 2015. He notes that around that time the idea came to him to consider the impacts of biological confinements on proteins. “I noticed that there was a knowledge gap in this area and an idea sparked in me to come up with a method to mimic the confined conditions in cells,” he said.

Zhongyu’s research involves creating the biological confinement structures and then monitoring any changes to proteins using electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectroscopy, a technology he first learned at Pittsburg and then continued working with at UCLA. Given that only a small number of EPR centers are set up across the country, Zhongyu sees his EPR experience as a unique qualifier to his research.

Zhongyu Yang, associate professor in the Chemistry and Biochemistry department at NDSU, was recently awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Career Award. Yang studies the structural information of protein molecules impacted by confined environments. He hopes to better understand how spatial confinement (such as is found in natural cell structures) impacts protein functions.