Dongyan Zhang

Biography

Dr. Zhang has received exceptional training on microbiology, biochemistry, immunology, molecular biology, biotechnology, and bio-nanotechnology in the past 20 years in the People’s Republic of China, Japan, and the USA. Zhang was working on the development and detection of a Hemorrhagic Fever vaccine and Japanese Encephalitis vaccine when she was in the Shanghai Institute of Biological Products. She received her PhD training on the mechanisms of enterobacterial infection and the development of a simple, rapid, and relatively inexpensive diagnostic test to detect enterotoxins of Vibrio cholerae and enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli from clinical and environment samples. She has gained experience in plant biotechnology, especially gene mutation, and expression and purification of mutant protein during her postdoctoral training at Michigan Tech. She has engaged in bio-nanotechnology research on functionalization of carbon nanotubes with fluorescein isothiocyanate (FITC) labeled bovine serum albumin (BSA). Her expertise includes bacteriology culture techniques, separation and identification pathogenic species of enteropathogenic bacterium, tissue culture, fluorescence microscopy, protein expression and purification, production of monoclonal antibody and polyclonal antibody, enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), immunoblotting, immunoprecipitation, immunohistochemistry technique, isolation of DNA and RNA, PCR and RT-PCR, and hybridization of DNA or RNA.