Yan Zhang, Ph.D.

I build tools for biology, and I got here by running into their limits.

I started out building RNA regulators as an undergraduate in Julius Lucks’ lab at Cornell, now at Northwestern. I could model how these regulators would work and confirm that the designs broke no natural laws. Yet what worked in theory did not seem to work in a living cell. That wasn’t a design problem. It was a platform problem.

And that distinction is even more critical now: our ability to design biology is advancing, but the platform to deliver it hasn't kept pace.

In my graduate research, I moved into cell-free gene expression systems in Mark Styczynski’s lab at Georgia Tech. The programs ran better there, and we built biosensing programs that detect diverse classes of analytes and function in human samples, which is what point-of-need diagnostics actually demand. To make sure our sensors could deliver on that, we engineered the readouts too: an equipment-free result you can see by eye, a quantitative measurement that plugs into a personal glucose monitor, and a multiplexed test that answers several questions at once.

During my postdoctoral fellowship with Richard Murray and William Clemons at Caltech, I went after mechanistic insight into cell-free systems and phage biology. Together, these experiences shaped how I think about and approach cell-free synthetic biology: learn the machines, build the platform, and ship the program so it works in the wild.

As I establish my lab at Rice, I look forward to building that vision with you. You can read more about what we are building on the research page, or see the active projects driving the work right now.

Appointments and Awards

Assistant Professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Rice University (January 2027-)

Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) Scholar
Rice University (January 2027-)

NIH MOSAIC K99/R00 Pathway to Independence Postdoctoral Fellow
California Institute of Technology (2024-)

Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow
California Institute of Technology (2022-2024)

Education

Ph.D., Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology (2022)

B.S., Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
Cornell University (2017)

Select Public Talks

Designing Predictive Cell-Free Systems with One-Pot PURE
AIChE Annual Meeting, Boston, MA, November 2025 · slides

Optimizing Protein Expression in the One-Pot PURE System
Build-a-Cell Seminar Series, virtual, April 2025 · video

Protocell Arrays for Simultaneous Detection of Diverse Analytes
Synthetic Biology Young Speaker Series, virtual, March 2023 · video

Contact

Email: yz350[at]rice[dot]edu
Curriculum Vitae