An accomplished researcher who has spent the last five years working at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital has joined the medical school’s Department of Biomedical Sciences and Center for Immunobiology.
Yu Zhang, MD, PhD, began her new role at WMed as an assistant professor on October 1, 2018.
Prior to coming to WMed, Dr. Zhang was a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Frederick Alt in the Program of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital and the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. During her time in Dr. Alt’s lab, Dr. Zhang took on the project “Mechanisms that Control Antigen Receptor Variable Region Exon Assembly,” and her research revealed many important mechanistic insights on the nature of RAG-mediated illegitimate V(D)J recombination that leads to oncogenic lesion in B and T cell lymphoma.
Her research also implicated a novel mechanism of RAG targeting via linear tracking on DNA to locate substrates and demonstrated physiological importance of RAG tracking in normal V(D)J recombination during antigen receptor assembly.
Dr. Zhang earned her MD degree from Capital Medical University in China in July 2008. She earned her PhD in biology from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2013. Her research interests include antigen receptor diversification, genome instability and DNA repair, and 3D Chromatin structure.
During her time at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Dr. Zhang worked as a research assistant in the laboratory of Dr. Kirill Lobachev in the School of Biology. Dr. Zhang has numerous publications to her credit and has amassed several honors and awards over the last 15 years.
Most recently, in 2017, Dr. Zhang was named a special fellow of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. The fellowship goes until 2019.
Meanwhile, Wesley Eichorn, DO, has joined WMed’s Department of Family and Community Medicine as an assistant professor.
Dr. Eichorn is a 2014 graduate of the Michigan State University College of Osteopathic Medicine and he completed his three-year residency in Family Medicine in 2017 at WMed. Prior to becoming a faculty member at WMed, Dr. Eichorn worked for more than a year as a physician at Bronson LakeView Family Care in Mattawan, Michigan.
Dr. Eichorn is a diplomate of the American Board of Family Medicine and the American Board of Obesity Medicine. He also is a member of the American Academy of Family Physicians, the Obesity Medical Association, the American College of Osteopathic Family Physicians and the Christian Medical and Dental Association.