Rate My Professor Xiaodgon Zhang

Professor Xiaodong Zhang is Professor of Macromolecular Structure and Function in the Department of Infectious Disease, Faculty of Medicine at Imperial College London. She earned a B.Sc. in Physics from Peking University in 1988 and a Ph.D. in Physics from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1995, where she developed X-ray microscopy with chemical contrast. She conducted postdoctoral research in X-ray crystallography at Harvard University from 1995 to 1997 under Professor Don Wiley and at Cancer Research UK from 1997 to 2000. Joining Imperial College London as a Lecturer in 2001, she progressed to Reader in 2005 and was promoted to Professor of Macromolecular Structure and Function in 2008 within the Department of Life Sciences. From 2011 to 2014, she served as Director of the Centre for Structural Biology. In 2014, she moved to the Section of Structural Biology in the Department of Infectious Disease, Faculty of Medicine, and has been on secondment as Group Leader at the Francis Crick Institute since 2023. She currently chairs the management committee for the London Consortium for high resolution cryoEM (LonCEM).

Professor Zhang's research utilizes structural biology methods, including X-ray crystallography and cryo-electron microscopy, to investigate macromolecular machines in DNA processing. Her work focuses on bacterial transcription regulation, particularly the sigma54-dependent system involving DNA melting and template strand delivery controlled by AAA ATPase activator proteins; DNA damage signalling, response, and repair; chromatin remodeling; and the multifunctional p97 protein. Key publications include 'Molecular basis of FIGNL1 in dissociating RAD51 from DNA and chromatin' (Science, 2025), 'A DNA damage-induced phosphorylation circuit enhances Mec1ATR-Ddc2ATRIP recruitment to Replication Protein A' (PNAS, 2023), 'Mechanisms of DNA opening revealed in AAA transcription complex structure' (Science Advances, 2022), 'Structures of Bacterial RNA Polymerase Complexes Reveal the Mechanism of DNA Loading and Transcription Initiation' (Molecular Cell, 2018), and 'Structures of the RNA polymerase-sigma54 reveal new and conserved regulatory strategies' (Science, 2015). Her contributions have provided insights into bacterial stress response gene regulation and DNA damage repair mechanisms. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society (2024), Member of EMBO (2016), Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology (2011), recipient of the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award (2011), Wellcome Trust Investigator and Discovery Awards, and Human Frontier Science Programme Young Investigator Award (2002-2005).